📓 Capstone Week 1 Expectations

Capstone Section Expectations - Week 1

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Welcome to the first week of Capstones. During this week, you will start working solely on your independent Capstone project.

This is your culminating project from the past several months, and is your best opportunity to make a project that represents both your skills and you.

For this project, you will be expected to have a minimum of 120 hours worth of quantifiable work.

Research and Planning Logs

During this section, you'll want to make sure that you are keeping track of your progress by using a Research and Planning log. What your Research and Planning log looks like will be up to you, but what we want to see is a consistent commit history of your work throughout the week.

The Research and Development log can be used when you have performed work that is otherwise not trackable through Git, such as making a wireframe, meeting with a client, or doing research.

You do not need to update your log if you are otherwise making commits by adding code to your project.

An example of this Research and Planning log might look like this:

research_and_planning.md

### Research & Planning Log
#### Friday, 08/13
* 8:20: prioritize to-dos
* 8:40: research libraries for animations
* 9:30: try out react-spring library, review docs + examples
* 1:20: implement react-spring library in sample project
…

On Thursdays, your instructor will be using individual 1:1s to check the progress via your Research and Planning log or your commit history, and help you adjust your approach as needed. Feel free to bring questions to these meetings, or to ask for assistance during your Capstone work.

Please keep in mind that you must work during class time, and the commit history must represent a full day's work for each and every day.

Whiteboarding Practice

Additionally, as a class, we will continue to perform Whiteboarding interviews and practice. Coordinate with your Dev teams about when during the day you might want to perform these practice problems. The goal is for everyone to go at least once a week until the end of the term.

You will find example Whiteboard prompts every week, but you are welcome to bring other prompts if you've performed the prompts before or if they meet your needs better.

During this section, try to avoid using tools like ChatGPT or Co-Pilot. This is intended to help you with interview preparedness!

To Pair or Not to Pair?

During the Capstone section, you will be expected to work alone. This isn't to say that you can't collaborate, but you should be the only individual contributing to your code base.

If you want to gather resources, ask questions, get feedback, or otherwise ask other students questions you are more than welcome to do so.

Requirements

• Attendance policy still applies. You are still expected to attend Epicodus during normal class hours, and sign in and out of Epicenter. If you are an online student, we expect you to be in a voice channel in Discord server during normal class hours.

• Continue to sign in with a pair. Even though you may be performing independent work, you can still support your peers through this process. We encourage you to help each other with bugs or design decisions.

• You may use your own machine. Similar to team week and the independent projects for each course section, roughly half of students will need to bring their own machine. The wifi network will be available during this course section.

Independent Project

There will not be an independent project that happens during the Friday period as normal. Instead, you will continue working through your Capstones.

The final independent project submission will be performed on the last day of class.