Dealing with disappointment

A reflection on my third Mini Challenge at the Apple Developer Academy

As you can probably tell by this title, this is not a challenge I am proud of. I mean, I am proud of it in some ways, but in the end, everything just seems… weird.

This challenge was not at all how I expected. In the beginning I was thrilled when I realized my team was mainly composed by people I not only get along with, but really admire and like. We had worked together before and I'd had a blast, so my expectations were quite high for this one.

However, things started to go down still in the Engage part of the process. I suppose most of us were used to a certain way of leading challenges, and we started working this way — writestorming, followed by dot voting and picking the themes everyone voted for. Everyone seemed quite engaged for the topic we first chose, which was accessibility. However, when presentation day came, not all members felt like they were on the same page anymore. We ended up with a presentation I was not proud of, not having a well-defined challenge. I admit I got quite upset at this point, since we were working with a topic everyone wanted to work with at first.

By the end of this day, we decided to have a heart-to-heart conversation which led us to opening up about our insecurities, and why that topic wasn't working. Kudos for us, honestly. Being understanding with each other was definitely the thing I am the happiest about in this challenge.

Still, even though we started communicating better, it still felt like something was rather broken. I don't know whether it was the flow, our energy or what, but it just felt weird sometimes. I wish we had worked harder on that.

As I was saying, everyone being so understanding was a very special thing in this project for me. We were all dealing with quite chaotic scenarios. I, personally, was working an 8-hour job, working on my final project for university in addition to 7 other subjects which demanded a lot of time. My mental health was broken, and I felt like I was able to talk about it with my colleagues, who were quite understanding with my struggles. With everyone's struggles, actually. We were all kinda messed up, and we always told each other when we needed a break, personally.

However, I suppose the communication was not that clear when it came to group stuff. Something I could have done differently was expressing myself in better ways when something was making me feel unhappy or uncomfortable. I didn't know what to say, so I decided to say nothing. This kept piling up, and by the end of the challenge I felt like I was about to explode.

In the beginning of the challenge I made my goals very clear: I wanted to work with development as much as I could. I have no complaints whatsoever about this. All members were very understanding, and a special shoutout to Lucas and Pastre for helping me so much with my struggles with coding.

I felt like I was able to be part of every big decision we made in the project. By the end, when we started working separately (designers and developers as groups), sometimes I did not agree with the decisions made by the designers. They were always open to listening not only to my feedback, but to feedback in general, trying to make our app as best as we could.

I feel like I could have learned more in this challenge. I ended up coding mostly screen layouts (it was cool that I could teach what I knew about viewcode to other members, though). I wish I had learned more about the backend, or about SiriKit and Vision. The data management was particularly bad in this challenge, since we left it for the last moment and it was not working by the day of the presentation.

We certainly could have done a better job distributing tasks and responsibilities. As I said, we all had chatoic schedules, but still… I get the feeling some people ended up overwhelmed with work, while others ended up not working as much as they planned on (or as much as they said they would, actually). This led to a huge gap in the development of the app, since others had to cover for gaps made by other members. I admit this is what hurts me the most about this project, since we all had space for communicating our struggles, and we all had made it very clear that it was okay not to do stuff, as long as we let everyone else know in advance. I felt left down by one particular member at the final stage, and this honestly upset me big time.

Due to our issues with planning, the project was not completed the way we expected it to. On the morning of the presentation we still had not applied UserDefaults. We had Camera and Siri working well, but nowhere to save that data. We had screens that looked beautiful, full of placeholder information. Trying our best to fix it, we ended up breaking everything. We divided our tasks for the presentation, I made the script, others worked on the slides, while someone else was also trying to fix the code. The presentation was at 2pm, and we were the first ones. Another group had asked to go first, though, so we felt like we could still try to fix our bugs and show our hard work.

The clock hit 2pm, I was still on XCode, the other group did not have to present first, and I saw myself desperate. I was the one responsible for sharing the screen and I did not even have KeyNote open. I hadn't saved the background image for Zoom. I froze. I totally froze. Honestly, all I wanted to do was cry. I sucked it up, though, and worked with what I had in my hands: a presentation with a good storytelling, which talked about our features, and no app working to prove it. People kept saying it was ok, but for me, it was not okay. It was not okay to work that hard, spending nights awake working on features that just… seemed like nothing in the end.

The only thing that upset me more than this was seeing other people in my group were also upset. Seeing people I care about feeling down is truly heartbreaking, and I just felt more and more guilty.

Am I satisfied with my performance? Yes and no. I was dealing with so much during this challenge that I feel like I have to give myself a break and just understand that I did all I could do. That doesn't mean I'm happy about it, though.

For next challenges, I am certainly going to plan my personal schedule better, and set some personal goals so I end the challenge feeling like I learned more than I did this time.

Am I satisfied with the group's alignment? Again, yes and no. We should have planned stuff better. It's also important to admit when things get out of our control before it's too late. I feel like I could have been kinder to people. Perhaps they would feel like they could talk about it more.

Being honest… I am just very, very tired.