Being chill

The idea of anything relaxing is probably the opposite of what 3216 requires; being chill is something I'm not proud to say I don't have a lot of. From Wenxiang's engaging session last Monday, I was enraptured not just by his chill as heck shirt (which I got from Bjorn eventually, and which I will wear every night I work on 3216 so I'll be in line with the philosophy), but also the approach he took when it came to Zopim. 

Even while the idea of a customer support widget isn't the first of its kind, it's incredible to note that Zopim has been flourishing, with the $50M acquisition by Zendesk being a huge testament of its success. 

I don't know a lot about the industry, or the tech world for that matter. I didn't even know about the new Macbook and I have no clue what Ruby on Rails is. But one - and the best - thing to happen to a product (tech or not) is the undying faith and effort put into it by its creators. And to be able to get a great product, you'll almost definitely need an even better team. During the session, I got to ask Wenxiang about what made him press on despite the multitude of challenges faced while developing Zopim, to which he very firmly answered, "My team."

Teamwork is a quality always valued, but difficult to achiever. Everyone can consider themselves a team player, but you're only really playing if you're collaborating well in a team. From a literary background with project work almost always rooted in the "do your own parts, then come together and form the final essay" approach, it hasn't been easy for me to work in my assignments here.

3216 is quite the contrary of everything I'm comfortable with - and I might as well take this time to self-promote to whoever is looking at a good grade: I did the best in the modules I was the most uncomfortable with!!! If you're not looking at 3216 from the grade scale - I'm Virgo by birth and perfectionism is innate.....?

Back to the point of why 3216 is not agreeable with me - working on projects here is amazingly different. You have all sorts of working together - there's the whole team getting together, there's the individual role to play, there's the work-in-progress that gets passed on from one another. And they don't come in a particular order, and they don't end just after you accomplish something. You have to keep coming together, you have to keep communicating.

In our initial stages of working together for Assignment 1, our team faced major communication difficulties from just having everyone in different area codes at various periods. We settled on an idea quick and I jumped to designing, but I knew nothing about higher level UI design (all that lo-fi stuff and the process from wireframing to the visuals as shared by Su Yuen) and eventually ended up constantly changing the designs - which was a horrible and tedious task for Zhengyuan, my poor mate in the front-end area, who happened to be away on vacation in beautiful Japan.

Thankfully, our team has recognized the lack of communication and we're coming together a lot more frequently, which helps tremendously when it comes to building the app together. It's a lot easier to make executive decisions and nobody gets left out of the loop!!! Great great great.

To end this post: today's image (It's a GIF!!! GO SEE IT IF YOU MISSED IT because how dare you) is this Shiba stuck in a bush. Stay completely chill, continue working hard and you'll get your way out. In other news, it's Sunday and I've been in school for 10 hours and I feel like I should get a prize or something...