Project Overview
I have been assigned to work on a crowd-sourced travel planner app as my capstone project. This was good news since it was my top choice out of the available projects and, even better, I have great teammates. I think we each bring different skills and ideas to the project, and we are going to do a good job.
Our project seems comprehensible enough, but dividing up jobs and coming up with a work schedule was not an easy task. In our team meeting, we discussed dividing up work by frontend and backend or by components of the project. Both strategies presented pros and cons, but we ultimately decided to divide up work based on the major components of the project – the user, experiences, and search-related features.
A major reason for not dividing up the work by frontend/backend was that our project is a bit frontend heavy; this might make more work for some members than others. Also, it seems that all the members of our team are experienced with both frontend and backend, so dividing the work by major components allows everyone to take ownership of specific features and ensures that each aspect of our project will receive equal attention. Another plus is that we’ll all gain some additional experience with frontend and backend, and I think it lets us work more independently.
Technologies
All members of the team have previous experience using Python and Flask, so that’s what we chose to use for backend, along with MySQL for our database. When it comes to frontend, we’ll be using React via Next.JS.
I seem to be the odd one out since I don’t have previous experience using React (it wasn’t part of the curriculum when I took Web Dev two years ago), so I have my work cut out for me. It’s also been a while since I’ve used JavaScript, so that’s one more topic to review before beginning serious work on the project.
While I am eager to learn new things during the project and it’s sort of the point of these projects, it is frustrating for my work to be impeded by a knowledge gap. The class has a little bit of a tight schedule, and I would hate to slow down my team. However, it seems more prudent to invest time studying new technologies in the beginning rather than to stumble through the project later. By studying now, I will have a better understanding of what needs to be done and how to do it. I’m sure my work will move more quickly and smoothly than it would otherwise.
So, here’s to a slow start, but hopefully a strong foundation~
