Day 26 with the Final Stretch

March 30, 2026

Before Presentation

    There is a particular kind of focused energy that comes with knowing a deadline is no longer next week or sometime soon but is literally two days away. Today had that energy all over it. We spent the day doing final bug fixes on the DMAS, going through every feature, every flow, every edge case we could think of, and making sure that when we sat in front of the College of Engineering Dean on Wednesday, the system would behave exactly the way it was supposed to.

    Bug fixing at this stage is different from bug fixing in the middle of development. Earlier on, you find a problem and you have room to rethink your approach. This close to a presentation, you fix it and you move forward. There is no time for elegant rewrites. You find the issue, you address it cleanly, and you test it again. That was the rhythm of today which we find, fix, test, repeat.

    The system has come a long way from the first lines of code we wrote after getting design approval from the Engineering Department. Looking at what it is now versus what it was even a few weeks ago is honestly a little surreal. We built this. Three OJT students with a deadline and a shared GitHub repository built this. I do not want to get ahead of myself, but today I felt something close to pride about what we have made. Tomorrow is the last day of preparation before the big one. Everything we have not fixed today, we finish tomorrow.

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