Sprint 4 Review

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I met with my professor on Monday and luckily he was very understanding about the lack of visible progress this sprint. I wasn't able to demo the entire system, only a few command-line tools to prove that what I did get done is actually working. But he was fine with my progress anyhow.

We discussed when we would next meet, and decided that (since I'm crazy busy this week and will be out of town for a few days, as well) we'll meet the Monday after Thanksgiving. So this will be a 3 week sprint. I intend to push hard to finish this rewrite; since I will have a 5 day weekend for Thanksgiving I think it's do-able.

This is the beginning of the end for the basic functionality of the system. I should be done by the beginning of the spring semester, leaving revising the UI and the paper as the main things to accomplish next semester. The paper shouldn't be much of a problem; I'm a pretty fast writer and way back in high school I was actually better at English than most other subjects, so I'm not scared of it. The UI will probably be a bear though. In my work experience I've found creating a really good, usable UI is far harder than any other aspect of programming, and unfortunately we're just not taught much about that in classes. So it will be a challenge.

So anyway, that's the plan for the next sprint and through the end of the semester. There's still lots to do but I think I've got enough time.

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