Week 9

This past week was the first week after Spring Break. My team and I knew that the project would be due right after the break so we spent the break getting familiarized with the technologies that each would be using in its respective task. I chose to work on the front-end along with Blake Ellingham, so I started researching Twitter Bootstrap templates and going through the source code to see how my group and I could adapt it to fit our project. Before leaving for the break we had discussed what the splash page and what the templates would look like, so I had an idea of what I was looking for.

I had a lot of fun with this phase of the project. We used technologies such as Twitter Bootstrap, Django, Heroku, and Apiary. Our splash page looks very sexy and I learned a lot about passing information through JSON blocks, which I hadn't used before. I am looking forward to the next phase and hopefully I will learn a little more about the back-end that supports the site, given that the front end is pretty much done. We have working templates that can display any data that is fed to them. As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the features that I had never experienced before was working with five other software engineers in a project. It really gave me a sneak preview of what, in my opinion, some projects in the real world will be like. The whole team is divided into sub-groups, they all complete their assigned tasks, and then we all combine our results to make up for the whole project. It's a really interesting, chaotic at times, and efficient way to work.

I would say one of the take aways my group and I got from the project is that communication is key in order to succeed. It really cannot be emphasized enough, planning ahead and staying in synchronization with the rest of the team definitely pays off in the long run. We, as a team, will work on that to improve our efficiency and working style altogether.