In our capstone at SNHU, we enhanced an artifact or artifacts of our choice. The artifact I chose for enhancement is a representational state transfer (RESTful) webservice stack with an industry-standard interface that I created in my CS 340 Client-Server course six months ago. This program can perform queries and aggregations, reporting on documents in the database in numerous ways. It can also create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) documents. The artifact accomplishes its tasks both through an internal service and an external web service that utilizes the RESTful application programming interface (API).

I chose to enhance this project because it utilizes a culmination of concepts from past courses that best reflect my skills in software engineering, algorithms and their data structures, and databases, in that it demonstrates my knowledge and competence in solving real world problems that deliver value. There are a dozen different algorithms, each within their own portable and reusable module, and they all interact with the MongoDB database. Perfect for showing off my skills in design, implementing algorithms and displaying my database prowess. What is more, it is all my own in that it does not lean on someone else’s ability to design solutions to the problem.

This artifact is the product of collaboration. Although I did create the program on my own, it took collaborating with peers, tutors, and instructors, during my CS 340 course, for it to be successful. My peers and I in both the course’s discussion forum, and in SNHU’s Slack Chat for coders, helped each other progress. Tutors both from Slack Chat and our institution’s academic services assisted in helping me debug code and learn different ways to implement my ideas. Instructor feedback in both classes has broadened my understanding, and that has contributed to my work. The artifact also has the collaborative coding help site, Stack Overflow, to thank for its success.