Real World Experience
12 May 2022
The Unknown
Coming into 414, I didn’t really know what to expect for this semester. I knew that there would be a project that we would have to work on, but I didn’t realize to what extent that project would be. I didn’t even know that we would be making a website for actual customers. Being a part of this class really opened my mind to what I could possibly do in the future as a career. This project showed me that I could do more than I thought I even knew.
An Overview of the Project
For this class, we were given the task to create a website from scratch for our customer, Volunteer Ally. Volunteer Ally is a nonprofit organization with a goal of making it easy to find volunteer opportunities around you and go to them. The volunteer would be able to sign up and register for an opportunity that they like from a list of opportunities. An organization would be able to showcase their own opportunities on the website once they got verified by the admin. The admin has control of verifying the organizations and also can keep track of the hours that a volunteer does. We were given all this information and the different tools that we needed to create it by meeting with them and talking to them about what they wanted and needed. From there, we brought their website to life.
My Contribution
In 414, we used the same tools that we were previously using in 314 which was Meteor, Semantic UI, React, and etc. For this project, we were broken up into four teams of six where we had to work together to complete the website. The parts that I worked on were the landing page, sign-up functionality, the map, different buttons, and other design elements.
The landing page was fairly simple since it was mainly HTML and CSS. This was my favorite part of the website that I worked on since I like front-end development a lot. It was fun recreating their landing page and changing it slightly to make the formatting look cleaner. The sign-up page was also simple since I just had to create the form and add a bunch of different fields to it. The hardest part of this whole class for me was figuring out the map and how to implement all of its details. The one thing that I learned from this was not to try to finish everything at once. I should have split up every detail into different issues to make it easier for me to finish. Thankfully, one of my teammates was able to make it functional and helped me understand how he implemented it. I now know how to add a map to a website, which I’m happy about. Another part that I worked on was adding different buttons to the website like the send email and get directions buttons. The send email button brings you to your email account and lets you write an email to the email that was provided. The get directions button takes you to another tab on your browser and gives your directions to the address of the opportunity using google maps. These buttons are the part that I am most proud of because I didn’t think that I knew how to do that. I really surprised myself and proved that I’m capable of more than what I think I know. Finally, I did some design changes to make the website look nicer like editing the size of the map so it fits on all pages and also made the landing page show different information for different users whether that be a volunteer, organization, or admin.
Struggles
The part that I struggled with the most was communication with my teammates. Since this class was us working a lot online it was hard to find the time where we could all come together to talk about the website. Not having frequent talks with them definitely affected our project whether that be the design or how certain items functioned. Even though it was hard, it helped me develop my communication skills even further because I know the importance of collaboration between each other. Towards the ending of the project, our team was constantly texting and talking so we all knew that we were on the same page.
Conclusion
Overall, I really enjoyed this class. It was a lot of fun working with a group of like minded classmates. It was exciting to be working on something that is actually going to be used in the real world! Taking this class lit a fire within me and made me want to pursue software engineering as a job in the future.