Hello Everyone and welcome back for Week 4!

Okay, now for the fun part! My team and I had agreed on an idea for a mobile application, and we were excited to build this concept because we felt it fulfilled a need we had observed firsthand through our prior work experiences. However, we were not sure of how to go about achieving our goal. In this post, I will discuss how we developed our initial project design and some of the hiccups along the way!

First, we needed to discuss the main features and functionalities we wanted our application to include. Once we had decided upon these features, we designed the visual components of each screen of our application. We sketched out prototypes and configured individual screen layouts with text and buttons. We also had to lay out what the flow would look like from screen-to-screen and button-to-button.

Next, we had to decide the structure of our project. None of us was very well-versed in mobile development. One of our team members had experience with Vue.js and suggested we use this since it would be very similar to Javascript and HTML/CSS. We then decided to use Node.js for the Rest API. We may eventually also decide to incorporate a database to house all the personal information for our users. Navigating this portion of the project will be new and somewhat daunting for us.

This week, we were finally able to get everything set up with Vue and Node in our GitHub repository and start developing on our local machines. We set up deployment using Heroku, which was a new experience for us to navigate. We then started to program the pages of our application in Vue. Watching YouTube and Udemy videos and relying on each other to learn has been a very rewarding experience! At times, it feels like we don’t know much about what we are doing, but then when we watch a tutorial and are able to figure things out on our own, we realize how far we have come. Despite the aches and pains of learning in unfamiliar territory, I am excited to work on our project and see it come together!