During the Project Proposal stage this was my contribution to the Design Phase:
The Project Proposal stage could not have gone any smoother, from experience of working together before we utilised our knowledge of each others strengths to formulate a strategy that served us well throughout the project.
What Went Well:
The team Organisation and brainstorming was super efficient to get the project up and running, from Mariano experience in using similar technologies and contact with his brother to establish the idea of a dashboard that could benefit his company. This made it very easy to come up with a design and idea.
The issue was how to implement our idea utilising a full stack development, which neither of 🇺s had experience of. After some research and discussion, it was an easy decision to make it a MERN stack based on our knowledge and an adequate challenge to learn something that would help us in the future.
It did take a while to extract all the required information from the client, due to availability. Ideally, starting work on the execution could have started earlier.
One of the main reasons we chose this project was its connection to sustainability.
Most Valuable Lesson of setting up Authentication was in the learning process, making sure that when learning a new framework or methods, that the information is relevant to the version you are using. Our frustration was the current packages and frameworks, we learnt from tutorials were out of date making it difficult to accomplish in the time we set ourselves. My Team Role in this sprint was to setup the Front-End side with React, and start the login page and dashboard user interface. It was a learning experience converting my design of HTML,CSS and Javascript into React, which I had very little experience before. Testing the interaction between components and running development code to simulate the interaction between login page and dashboard before connecting front end to backend. Overall this stage went well and ontime setting up the front and backend, or so we thought until Sprint 2.
Most valuable lesson in this sprint was you cannot plan correctly for every stage and having patience and resilience when dealing with a tricky situation. This was due to our frustration with connecting the frontend to the backend. My role in this stage was to Develop the Inventory page, create the components and the routes with authentication to the backend. This Sprint became all about the authentication and being able to login with verification. We forecast a week for this sprint but it took a little over two as we struggled with getting the login to work. Part of the reason for this was the multiple of tutorials on MERN stacks we had watched, that featured out of date packages for react-dom-router, react, Axios even though they were only 6 months old. Navigating the various bits of code to develop the correct method, was tricky and having to search through documentation to find the solution which we did in the end for verification. Whilst we got Authentication with JSON Web Tokens to work from the backend to the database encrypting the password, we were unable to pass the authentication from front-back-front. With more experience now, as we moved through the project it will be high on list of future features to implement.
Most Valuable Lesson here was letting the previous sprint run over put added stress on time to complete this and future sprint. Frustration here was having to redo components as at this stage, had realised the benefit in breaking them up into smaller seperate components for performance and usability. Two main features here were the video on the login page, so it could be reused in Password Reset component and the add and edit components for the inventory. Initially I wanted to keep consistency by having them show up in the dashboard-content section like all of the dashboard components but came to the realisation of trying to calling a child component into the grandparent more difficult than I imagined. But unlike the previous issue of struggling with like the authentication, I quickly decided to come up with another solution which was to combine the add/edit components with the inventory component as an inline form, which had been dismissed during design as maybe being the more difficult way. Testing I performed here was writing a unit test, installing jest to test verification of login.
Most Valuable Lesson at this point was the lack of time left due to earlier over running, putting added strain and needing quicker thinking to solve issues. At this point I was completing Sprint 3 whilst Mariano had started trying to implement the weather api 5 day forecast, but was whilst connecting was struggling to pick out the data we needed. Once completing three I was able to jump in and he moved onto testing. Again with time against us I made a quick decision to implement current weather, instead of five day forecast and make that a future feature. During this implementation I could see how that could be implemented.
I took on a pro-active approach to organisation and planning and creating project management plan to make sure we followed agile principles to increase productivity and make the project a success. In the execution as I had more experience with front-side and Mariano with database design, we naturally fit into these roles. However due to our understanding and the transparency of our methods, we could learn exactly what was happening in the code the other was doing, and as such when needed we could jump into solve problems and help contribute. Our aim out of this project was to showcase what we have learned on the course so far, and develop skills we didn't have and have something to show in our portfolio. I consider the project a success as I really developed my skills in react as well as learning, and understanding the backend with node and express more. My confidence in using git and the importance of committing has also improved. The final thing I have gotten out of this project is what we planned in the beginning, was that this would have flexibility and scalability to expand on beyond the timeframe of the project. As evidenced with the roadmap, there is plenty of more life and learning to be had in this project.
