Senior Projects

With software development, there are basically two methodologies, waterfall, and Agile. In waterfall (also known as the linear-sequential life cycle model), every part of a project relies on a previous part of the project; everything builds on top of something else, like a cascade waterfall. It can be high risk, because if there is one problem, a part of the project way back may need to be completely rewritten. Agile is much more flexible, breaking the project into smaller and smaller projects until there are clear tasks for someone to do. Teams are basically self-sufficient and are able to plan their own iterations (aka sprints), which are like mini-quarters, typically less than a month in duration, where teams plan and meet their own goals (there are graphs and metrics watching the team and a dedicated team member watching the metrics called the scrum master). I will likely have a slide dedicated to this in my project, because Agile is really cool and decently complex, but at the same time simple.

I’m in effect shadowing an entire team and learning about those different roles. In my time here, I will have gotten to see the lifecycle of an entire sprint and the first two days of another, which is really cool. This is my last week at the company and now we’re trying to find little ways I can be a value-add, which is nerve-wracking because I don’t know very much in this space, and talking to people is scary, but also exciting because it’s new and a learning experience. On Thursday of the third week, I realized I had told them the wrong ending date in meetings; I told them the 29th when we had both agreed on ending the 23rd, and I had to rectify that in a one-on-one meeting with my supervisor. He was pretty chill about it and we set up an in-person lunch meeting with the team and a few other people for when I’m in Phoenix in late April/early May.

I’ve been facing a lot of technical difficulties and waiting on various permissions from the company, which took up a lot of week two. I got very well acquainted with the helpdesk and the process for asking for technical help in the corporate environment.

For the last couple weeks I’ve been in and out of departments, shadowing one or two people a day. Last week I spent most of the week in business meetings with  CFO and CEO  and other owners  of the company.  I got to go to a sials organization with one of Craftsmens  bigger customers  where I got to meet a lot of people  and understand the relational side of a business. I also got to sit in some sales meetings,  some HR meetings, and some monthly meetings I that keep all the employees in the loop about what’s going on in the business. This week so far I got to Shadow some of the sales employees. I’ve learned what goes on after the trailers at Craftsman are sold. All the way from running numbers and getting the trailers delivered to where they need to get delivered to, to walking around a parking lot and understanding how to prep a trailer once it’s been sold, or before it’s been sold how to make the truck look good so that a customer wants to buy it. The biggest thing that I’ve learned a Craftsmen is that no one has just one job. People don’t use job titles that often   because they’re always doing something more than their job title says or requires. all the employees say that they were multiple hats and so far in the last several weeks of shadowing different people in the company I’ve learned that that’s true. The rest of the week I will be shadowing more employees each day learning about what hats they wear in the company. As of now the next two weeks i will be in sales, learning about how to sell a trailer and how to maintain a relationship with a customer. 

So I finished the course (Discovery) signifigantly earlier than expected. Luckly there is a more advanced couse I can do called CodeAbbey. It focuses more on problem solving wish code rather than how to code in general. I had fun with Discovery and hopfully I will enjoy this too.

day 7- day 7 I worked a lot with the shipping department and learned how their gears are polished. I also got to sit in on a meeting to confirm if their online stock was up to date with their actual in store stock.

Day 8- I got the day off work.

Day 5- the person who usually works the cnc machine was sick, so I had to work the machine basically all day. For a couple hours towards the end of the day they had me working 2 machines at the same time.

day 6- I spent most of the day unpacking differential parts and organizing them on a palate. I learned one of the big struggles of the companys since day 1 was actually having their employees show up to work. Seven people didnt show up to work on day 6.

Day 3- I was helping The owner of the business with random tasks around the store. I mainly helped him check drivetrain parts for quality control, and organized the shop.

day 4- In the morning I helped the owner with more tasks, during the second half of the day I worked with the shipping department dn not only helped them ship things, but learned how they organize their products.

I fell a little behind in the Discovery course so I did about 4hr of work over the weekend. I forgot about the debug log. Not sure why. However once I did. I was able to fix my code pretty fast. It was mostly just forgeting to add a simicolons and quoation marks. Now the debug log will be the first thing I check if there is an issue.

This week I spent half the time across the street at New Frontier Materials and the other half with Glenn at Fred Weber again. New Frontier Materials bought out most of Fred Weber last June so the employees from both companies still know each other well.

On Monday I spent the day with Nick who is a quality control guy for New Frontier. He took me with him to the New Melle Quarry and told me all about what types of rock go in certain cement and asphalt mixes and what the state regulates about those processes. We took some samples and brought them back to the lab to test.

On Tuesday I went with Glenn to meet with the Engineers at Hurst-Rosche Engineering firm about an issue at a quarry FW owns.

On Wednesday I worked with Glenn and Mark Denton, Vice President at Fred Weber. They gave me a little research project where I am creating a list of competitors and compiling all public data on them and their production capabilities. I basically spent the whole day doing this.

On Thursday I spent the day with Ken Kampman at New Frontier and we went down to Iron Mountain Trap Rock Quarry near Farmington, MO. We flew a drone over the to get volumes on all the stockpiles to essentially take stock of the rock that was ready to be sold and make sure that the amount that was actually there corresponded to the amount in the books.

I went into this week not really knowing the plan, but this week we got two new cows, and we finished a lot of fencing that needed to get done. We are setting up things for next week when we begin our water line project.

Now that I have a good understanding of if/else. loops, and strings. I have moved onto shap making I have not figured it out yet. I do a lot of debugging. But my next two lessions are on creating shapes so I should get better at it.