Looking Back at ICS414
11 May 2022Software engineering II has brought a lot of new insight and knowledge for me regarding coding techniques. With the new version of the Meteor template to work off of, it felt like I was re-learning software engineering all over again. Everything was structured and organized differently, it was hard to implement things that I have previously done with the old template. However, at the end of the class I feel that I gained a lot of knowledge on adapting to new change and how to work with it.
Meeting Volunteer Ally
The main thing that got me excited for this class was the fact that we were able to work with a real client who was seeking our help. Being able to meet them (virtually) and see their website idea got me brainstorming a lot about different features we could implement and how to make it user-friendly. The point of the website was for people of all ages to be able to search for various volunteering opportunities throughout the island from different organizations and be able to sign up for them. This was an interesting idea and got me looking forward to working with my team to tackle this huge challenge. Each customer milestone got me and my team motivated to complete our redesign into something that they would be proud of. Hearing their feedback and compliments fueled us for our next meeting and helped us create an end goal for our milestones.
Redesigning Volunteer Ally
For our mockup, we hard coded a lot of what they wanted the website to look like. Down to every last detail such as the headers, menu, footers, and event profiles. From the beginning I could see that this website was jam packed with a ton of features that would take a lot of time to implement. For example, the event profile has a lot of interactions that the user can do. There were buttons for social media sharing, a button to send an email to the organization, an interactive Google map that displayed where the event is taking place, and even a get directions button. I knew later down the road that implementing all of these would be a big challenge for us. There were also new features that the client wanted us to implement such as an admin dashboard and a way for organizers and admins to verify hours for volunteers. I was in charge of designing what the admin dashboard would look like and how we would go about verifying hours. After much brainstorming between the team, I came up with the idea of having separate tabs for volunteers and events for the admin to view. The individual events in the events tab will have a view button that would show all the volunteers that participated and the amount of default hours that the event lasted. The admin has an option to either check all of the volunteers off or edit a specific volunteer with the amount of hours they were there for. After submitting and verifying the hours, the admin is then able to export the table into a CSV file format for recording purposes. I had a lot of fun brainstorming different ways for admins to verify hours and how the dashboard would look because it gave me the freedom to let my creativity take advantage and design it to what I thought would be the most user-friendly solution.
Challenges We Faced
There were a lot of challenges that me and the team had to overcome while completing this project. The biggest challenge we were faced with was creating the collection for each data category that was necessary for the site to work. Many pages of the website required a lot of data to be cross referenced and matched. For example, creating a volunteer profile would mean pulling up data from their user data as well as the events that the specific user has participated in and how many hours this user has participated. This required many collections to be created so that they could be easily matched with other collections and also be easy to search for specific data.
Our team came up with a rough mock up on the sort of collections we needed to create and how they related to one another. This map was in the early stages of our planning but it definitely showed the amount of thought we put into making the website as efficient as possible.
Throughout the semester we would refine our collections to make it work better in our project and are constantly adding new things to the collections to support the type of data we want to store. Personally this was a big hurdle for me because I wasn’t too good with the concept of collections, and having so many made me feel overwhelmed. By asking questions from my team and looking through each collection carefully, I was able to get the hang of it and be able to utilize it in my code.
Another big challenge we faced was trying to implement all the features that the client wanted. I have spent many hours searching for a library to implement it in our code and reading documentation on how to use their code and setting it up. For example, for the CSV export feature, I spent some time searching through Google on the best file export/import javascript library that would work best with our project. After I narrowed down my search, I spent time researching how to implement it and make it work for the file format that we wanted and how to read in the data that was presented in our site.
Looking Back
Now that it’s the end of the semester, I am very glad I took this class because not only did I get to practice my coding skills with a team, I had the opportunity to practice my communication skills and even a little bit of leadership skills. Preparing myself for a full time career, having social and communication skills is just as important as knowing how to code. Being able to work in a team and being a valuable team member changes the group dynamic and helps streamline the project much more smoothly. Learning how to implement different libraries into our project is a skill that will prove useful later on in my career where I will implement new features into products that I’ll be working on.