Web Application Development From A Novice View.
Designing and developing a web application, especially on a team of developers who are all or nearly all green to the field of web development, is no easy task.
- Working with others with completely different views, ideas, and understanding of the task at hand.
- Understanding what is being asked of you and how to accomplish that without letting anyone down or stepping on toes.
- Communicating with team members from the DataScience Team, Front End Team, and in my case, my Back End Team to efficiently and effectively create what the client is looking for.
Our mission, To create an application that would be a one-stop-shop for city search and information, all packaged together in a quaint display screen! We would need login capabilities with a user dashboard. We would also need a search feature-complete with GPS mapping capabilities and saving searched cities to the user dashboard.
Our team consisted of 4 Data Scientists, 2 Front End Developers, and 2 Back End Developers, which I myself am a part of. Having worked on many projects in the past as part of the Lambda School curriculum, I have experienced team members leaving and leaving me with the bulk of the work, which was a concern I had. Another concern I had was that there was already a large part of the work set up for me, so I had to go through code that I was not familiar with, maybe code that had not been written the way I had learned.
The design process took up about two weeks, and I went in very confident that I knew back-end design and could create a great API and DB. My teammate was a little less confident, but that was ok because I love helping others out.
The End Results!!!
We developed the back end complete with API Routes and Models using Node.js and Express and the DB using PostgreSQL and Docker. After working with my team and trying extensively to guide my back end through what was going on, he decided to leave the team and attempt labs another time… you were missed :(. The development went very quickly, and everything worked well. The user could log in and search for city data and even save the city to their profile for later, at least in Postman… My front end contacted me, and they could save the data, but only one city was being displayed when displaying the information for the user. The front-end team and I hopped on a zoom call and went over code together (three heads are better than one). We found that, for some reason, I had set the post city route to add all new cities to index 0. I rewrote the code, and all is well!
After completing my portion of this project, I consulted with a mentor and discussed what I had done and why I did what I did. My mentor opened my eyes to some things that I had not thought of. For instance, he discussed the design would be better off as many too many joins for the ease of access and space. He also talked about how we had the user save the city information to a table. Then, when they would bring up the city in the future, the information would be the same, and this method would lead to stale information. Both of these were ideas that I had not thought of. All in all, this project, like every project I work on, taught me a lot. It taught me more about the design process and to take your time early and work out all the kinks. It also taught me that it's ok if I don’t know everything because I have some great peers to help me!
A Brief Walkthrough
Features:
- user can log in
- user can search for a city
- user can see city info
- user can pin city to dashboard
- user can delete city
For the future of this project, I would like to add a feature that would allow the user to view houses and or apartments in the searched city. For instance, if they searched Austin, Tx, and liked the data they got back, the user could click on a search housing button and be given a list of house listings.
This project truly has helped build my confidence. My problem-solving abilities have grown the most! I truly believe that the experience I have gained with this project has better prepared me to join a team as a developer and provide better than expected contributions.
