Our 5-year software engineering degrees are coming to an end, and we are fondly looking back over our experiences filled with highs and lows. There were ample memorable moments during our tenure here, but one that we will cherish for a long time is our engineering capstone project with Arcurve.
As part of fulfilling final year engineering degree requirements at the University of Calgary, students are expected to complete a full-year project related to software engineering in collaboration with an industry sponsor. Last May, before our final year of studies, we looked long and hard at a variety of different capstone projects. We’re grateful for all the opportunities that came our way. However, in the end, one of our team members reached out to the CEO of Arcurve, Jay Gohill, who connected with us with a project that aligned with what we were looking for - a challenging full-stack project with an opportunity to make a real impact.
After the onboarding logistics, we jumped straight into development in September 2021. Our project involved Arcurve and one of their clients. We were given a thorough overview of their existing product and what we were expected to build. Our team really appreciated how the requirements of this project were very clearly outlined by the product manager at Arcurve - we were able to focus on doing what we loved, which is writing code and creating products together.
For this project, we used AngularJS for frontend development, C# for backend development, and Azure for cloud deployments and version control. This tech stack was completely new to most of us. Despite it being initially difficult for us to onboard ourselves to this new slice of technology, we were ultimately able to adapt to it and with that, we learned several new paradigms in programming that were uncharted to us before. Throughout the entire process, clean and production-level code was emphasized greatly. Our code was reviewed by a senior software developer at Arcurve, which exposed us to building effective code that is maintainable, scalable, and readable. We’re elated to look back and say we’ve significantly improved as software developers through this entire experience.
On top of that, we had bi-weekly sprints with stakeholders from Arcurve and the client. Our project ran like any real project at Arcurve following agile development methodologies, which further taught us how software projects are run in the industry. In a way, we felt like we were part of the full-time software development team at Arcurve. In a couple of weeks, our team will be deploying our project to production for end-users to use. From software development to business management, we learned how these two aspects interface with each other and how we can apply these skills to our careers in the future.
We would like to sincerely thank Jay Gohill, Camelia Balan, Martin Hanson, Helder de Oliveria, Andre Busque, Clay Swerdelian, and Murray Larkins for their support and endless patience with us. It’s bittersweet to realize that this university chapter of our lives is coming to an end. Moving forward, we all will be carving our own paths in life and embarking on our own journeys. As our team of graduates disperses to different parts of Canada and the United States, we’ll reminisce upon this special part of our life with hints of gratitude, appreciation, and admiration.
