Turning Goals into Project Ideas

This week, I got to comment and give feedback on my teammates’ educational and career goals. I commented on Nabiha’s Week 4 post at https://nabcsonline.blogspot.com/2026/05/week-4.html and Luke’s Week 4 post at https://lukerdanuker.blogspot.com/2026/05/week-4.html.

For possible capstone ideas, the first project I might choose is a more complete version of Cat Tinder, which was an idea from my coding bootcamp. I think it would be fun to rebuild it with more time and better planning, possibly as an adoption-style app where users can view cat profiles, swipe or match with cats, and save favorites. It would let me work on frontend design, user interaction, databases, and maybe even authentication. A second possible capstone idea is creating a small video game or interactive mini-game demo. I don't know if I would want to make something too large in scope, but I think a polished mini-game could still be a strong project if it has clear gameplay, good visuals, and working mechanics. A third possible capstone idea is building some kind of B2B SaaS tool. This would probably be the most career-aligned option for me because I am interested in software engineering for business-focused applications. I could imagine building a tool that helps teams organize workflows, automate communication, or track information more efficiently.

This week in CST 349, we started planning for our final project videos by discussing three possible topics with my team. After coming up with our options, we each had to vote individually on which topic we preferred for our own team and for each team in the cohort. This helped me think more about how important topic selection is because the final video needs to work for both a professional audience and a general public audience. In CST 300, I worked on drafting my ethics essay, with most of my focus on the stakeholder analysis section. My essay topic is whether companies should be allowed to pay ransomware demands when hackers threaten to leak private customer data or disrupt important services. This week helped me practice looking at the same issue from two opposing perspectives instead of only focusing on my own opinion. I am also starting to think more seriously about internships and future career preparation. Since my career goal is to return to software engineering, I want to keep building projects that connect to full-stack development, B2B SaaS tools, and AI-literate software engineering. I am not currently focused on graduate school, but I do want to stay open to it later if it becomes useful for my career goals.