The Final Week

When I started this project back in February I thought I would be able to accomplish several components of an extremely large and complicated platform. After realizing the infeasibility of this, I narrowed my focus and started developing a program from the bottom up which would read emails and provide reminders.

Even though I was able to hone my goal, I never had a clear method and did not exactly know what the next step would be. I spent a frustrating amount of time worrying about components which were not necessary for this project (SQL phase), but eventually developed a clear method and timeline of what to do and when to do it which allowed to achieve my goal. On the plus side I learned several programming skills that I will build on in the future. I managed to learn several programming skills that were related to this project.

Besides improving my programming skills, I learned how email is sent and received on the Internet through different servers and the main components of a client email. I created a program that can access an inbox and carry out classic functions that a client would want such as fetching emails, deleting emails, and creating folders. Recently I figured out how to fetch messages from my inbox and put them into a java object; allowing me to sort through messages. As of right now I am trying to implement other algorithms to get the date and time as well as the task description from the messages. Then I can print the reminders list and trigger an email message 10 minutes before the time of the event, which will act as a reminder notification.

The most valuable takeaway from this entire experience is that I learned that computer science is a “figure it out” type of industry. Technology is changing by the second and it is important stay ahead in the game, which is why I will continue to further develop this program even after my presentation (May 17). It will be tough, but definitely worth it.

As my project comes to an end, I would like to thank Mr. Adams and Ms. Belcher for keeping me on task and to everyone who supported and encouraged me.

Thank you once again for reading!