Reflective Activities

The goal of reflective activities is to give you an opportunity to apply learnings to your project.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” — Socrates

Analyze a FOSS Project

Individual Activity

Find a FOSS project on GitHub or another publicly available repository, ideally of some relevance to your project, analyze what the maintainers have put in place to manage and organize the project (processes, etc.), and write a summary of what you learned that could or should be applied to your project. Include specifics. Share it with your team.

Read ACM Queue Articles

Individual Activity

Find an ACM Queue Article of some relevance to your project, read it, and write a summary of what you learned that could or should be applied to your project. Include specifics. Share it with your team.

Read a Book

Individual Activity

Find a good book on software engineering, read it, and write a summary of what you learned that could or should be applied to your project. Include specifics. Share it with your team.

Here are some ideas:

• ⭐️ Software Engineering at Google
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
• The Mythical Man Month

Watch ACM Tech Talks

Individual Activity

Find an ACM Tech Talk of some relevance to your project, watch it, and write a summary of what you learned that could or should be applied to your project. Include specifics. Share it with your team.

Watch a Documentary

Individual Activity Team Activity

Watch a documentary film related to your project. Each team member writes a paragraph about a different aspect of the film that is relevant to the project.

Here are some ideas:

• The Social Dilemma
• Design Disruptors
• The Great Hack
• AlphaGo
• Inside Envoy: The Proxy of the Future
• Prometheus: The Documentary
• How A Small Team of Developers Created React at Facebook | React.js: The Documentary

Listen to a Podcast

Individual Activity

Find a podcast episode of some relevance to your project, listen to it, and write a summary of what you learned that could or should be applied to your project. Include specifics. Share it with your team.

Here are some ideas:

• The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
• Darknet Diaries
• Open Source Security Podcast
• Acquired
• The Futur Podcast

External Feedback Session

Individual Activity

Find someone that has relevant expertise to review your project. It can be a technical person or a knowledge domain expert. The person should have little knowledge of your project.

Present the relevant parts of your project to them and collect their feedback. Write a summary of what you learned that could or should be applied to your project. Include specifics. Share it with your team.

Learning Journal

Individual Activity

A learning journal is a personal record where you reflect on your learning experiences, capturing insights, challenges, and progress over time. It’s all about metacognition (thinking about thinking).

1. Write weekly reflections on what you learned, challenges faced, and how you overcame them.
2. Relate new knowledge to past experiences.
3. Evaluate your skills and identify areas for improvement.