Capstone: Technology Review

Introduction

My team’s capstone project is an industry one, so we had a tech stack that was mostly decided for us already. However, it turned out to be pretty great! We all had some new things to learn, but it has been an exciting opportunity for growth and skill building.

Here are some examples of the technologies our team is using/learning so far:

• Vuetify: UI Component Library
• Figma: UI Prototyping
• Vue: JavaScript Framework
• Vite: Local Development Server
• Eslint: Linting
• Mocha: Test runner
• Chai: Unit Testing
• Cypress: UI testing

In this post, I will take a moment to review some of the technologies we’ve been using in our capstone project to reflect on what was difficult and what was the most enjoyable to work with.

What is your most favorite technology? Least favorite?

My favorite technology that I learned was Vuetify. After learning the basics of it, it became easy to add in new UI components into our application when building our UI. What was also exciting was that in the UI prototyping stage, we could use Vuetify template libraries in Figma to closely align our designs with the final product. This greatly reduced development time and increased consistency throughout our app.

My least favorite technology we have worked with in the project was Vue, mostly due to my initial difficulty in learning certain aspects of it, as described in the next section. However, after spending a lot more time working with Vue, I now have become more used to it and enjoy it.

What technology did you have difficulty learning, but now appreciate?

I had difficulty learning Vue at first, as I expected it to be very similar to React.js, but there were several differences that took me longer to understand. For example, the concept of the v-model. v-models are used in Vue components to dynamically keep track of values and respond to changes happening in a Vue app. Another concept that was different for me was that React.js uses the JSX language for templating, whereas Vue uses HTML.

Once I had more practice with Vue and starting to build out sections in our project I was working on, the concepts ended up becoming clearer and I appreciated the framework more. Nevertheless, there is still more I want to learn about data flow in Vue (including Observables and computed properties), since they are relevant to our team’s project.

Summary

So far in our Capstone project, I’ve found that Vue was difficult for me to learn at first, but once I had more practice with it, I could see how effective it could be in creating our application. Combined with using Vuetify, my personal favorite, our team is able to quickly bring our designs to life with beautiful UI components and dynamic interactivity. Throughout the development process for this project, I will continue to learn more about the tools we are using in order to make further improvements to our application and my skillset.