Getting to Know a Big Project

As stated in my introduction, I have never been involved with any academically collaborative research before. To get my gears turning, I started by working separately with Professor Meneely so he could set me up with the repository for our project as well as any other tools I may need for developing. Nothing short of brilliance, Professor was able to guide me through the research process in a timely and efficient manner while catching me up with the latest steps of our research and our tech stack. This has undoubtedly been a fast learning experience already as I discover new things every day in our studies. So far, I've experienced struggles in learning the integration of our software with our data and analysis visual representations. Since this research has been conducted even before my time here at RIT, I missed out on the opportunity to understand why/how each file was created and how they work with the other files of their kind. To overcome this struggle, I have been working with Professor Meneely to brush up my skills while trying to refactor segments of our repository to have better fluidity in our coding structures.

Although learning to use a new system can be challenging, it is rewarding to develop the new skills that the system entails. For our research I will be learning how to use several new programming languages, new text editors, several programming packages, and many other software tools. I've learned that it is extremely important to feel comfortable with the system you are using, getting to know its terminal very well, and performing private research on the side in order to better understand what you are working with.