December 2nd 2024 - Weekly Problem Set, This week at LaunchCode, and Monthly Project Challenges

[johncfrauen-lc101]

Problem sets for Software Engineering and Data Analysis are now published in the repo: https://github.com/LaunchCode-Code-Connect/weekly-problem-set

Updates for this week at LaunchCode are now published in the repo: https://github.com/LaunchCode-Code-Connect/this-week-at-launchcode

Monthly Project challenges are now published in the repo: https://github.com/LaunchCode-Code-Connect/monthly-project-challenges

[kelliedlynch]

I want to offer a little feedback on the monthly challenges. I love the concept, but a couple of things I noticed:

• The advanced challenge is, uh...ambitious, to say the least. I honestly don't think this is possible for a single person to do in a month, even working full-time on it. I want to note that one single feature in the long list is "Payroll processing, including tax and benefit calculations." This is a task so complicated that many companies outsource it to an entire separate company. And one of the bonus challenges is "make a mobile app"? I understand that we can work on this in groups, but a project of this complexity would need a skilled project manager to even have a chance of being completed by a small team who are presumably not working on it full-time. I would love to see an advanced challenge that a single person could conceivably complete in a month with serious effort, or a small group could do in their spare time.
• The intermediate challenge could use a summary, like the basic and advanced have. You can kind of piece together the big picture from the list of requirements, but it would really help to have an overview.
• This is kind of a nitpick, but I see Heroku listed as a deployment option. Heroku got rid of its free tier 2 years ago, so it's not really an option for most people, and kinda makes me think that nobody has reviewed/updated these challenges in a long time. It might be worth looking them over to make sure their requirements still line up with today's practices and expectations.

Thanks for putting this group together, and any complaints aside, I love what you're doing here! I'm about to get started on my monthly challenge project, and I'm looking forward to working on it--but I'm sticking to the basic one. 😄

[johncfrauen-lc101]

Thanks Kellie! I'll incorporate these notes into the January monthly projects design.