Project Showcase reactions

After the Project Showcase, I am quite impressed with the level of all the presentations. From my point of view, all of us made a great effort in the last weeks to improve the pitches and demos. VisualScheduler (1st) and MechanApp (2nd) were the winners of the Spring 2014 CS 460 Project Showcase. Honestly, my personal bet before the event was exactly the same as the final jury's decision. It was obvious that both projects were the best ones, and finally the judges opinion was similar to (I guess) the rest of my classmates.

In my opinion, VisualScheduler is, by far, the most helpful app, because all of us know how difficult is to build your schedule using the current UNM system, so you (and the judges) quickly realized that this application could be really useful for a lot of students, not only at the UNM, but also in other universities along the U.S. Additionally, they gave a very good presentation (as usual), so they deserved the first place, with no discussion. On the other hand, MechanApp also gave a decent presentation, and their application looked very cool, especially in terms of design. Apart from these facts, I think that, in terms on usability, this is the second most useful application, only surpassed by VisualScheduler. I would like to congratulate all the teams, especially the winners. As said before, the level of all the projects and presentations was higher than I expected at the beginning of this course.

Regarding to my team, I believe that we gave a very clean presentation, much better than only a week ago. In this sense, Matt S. and Matt F. did an awesome job, all went as planned. It was worth getting together last Sunday and Monday for walking through the presentation, as well as the practice pitch on Friday and definitely, the feedback provided by Ackley.

Despite not winning any prize, I am very proud of the project I was working on. I believe that we worked very hard along the last months, and I have learnt to use new technologies such as Ruby on Rails. However, the most important thing I may say about this course, is that I was able to work as part of a development team in a country different from I am used to work, which is a priceless experience for me. Thank you to all the classmates, and especially to my teammates!