Week 2 of my capstone project has rolled around, and things are looking pretty good. In terms of what we have done, we are approximately a week and a half of schedule in terms of deliverables. I feel that I need to explain a little more in-depth as to what the capstone project entails…

At its core, this project’s goal is to create a proposal (and accompanying documentation) in response to the RFP (Request for Proposal) from a fictional association of five doctors. They own fairly decent sized fictional offices each with similarly sized nurse/clerical staff departments. As part of the proposal, we need to design a solution that will allow the doctors to maintain their offices during normal business hours without any service interruption. There is also the issue of security, backups, and migrating client/doctor information to a centralized RDBMS (database server) at a central office.

So far, we have been keeping fairly on top of things. The first two weeks of the project have involved preliminary research and beginning our documentation. I have introduced a method of centralizing all of the research data and information that the group finds into a project website using 37signal’s very excellent web application, Basecamp. Even though we see each other all the time at school (the majority of my group shares the same classes earlier in the week that I do), having an online presence to store data and keep updated is proving to be a good idea already.

I am something of a bang-whiz enthusiast; if I find something interesting that has a practical application, there is a good chance I will tell other people about it and attempt to foist it off onto other people in the hopes that there are more benefits, especially if it is user-friendly and intuitive like Basecamp is. I have been familiar with 37signals and their offerings in the past, and I am currently using their Backpack web application as a note-taking device for all of my classes this quarter. I’m of the belief anybody who has to handle a lot of information, or just needs somewhere to store their thoughts online (barring a blog or personal website like this one) in a private environment, Backpack is a handy tool to have.

Anyway, next week I plan on bringing up the workload another notch; we are going to get into the real thick of things when the group gets together next Wednesday. I don’t know if I’d want to do something like this exclusively (prepare a full, customized solution from the ground up for a company) as a career, but thus far it has been fairly enjoyable.

I just hope I don’t end up biting my tongue in the coming weeks thanks to that statement.