Persistent Progress
I have to say that I’m impressed with how well the project seems to be going. I’ll admit that my confidence in the project was a bit up and down at first, at least regarding my own abilities. When first assigned the project, I felt confident that it wouldn’t be too bad and was simple enough that I could have created it by myself as a side project. After the team decided on technologies for frontend, though, my confidence was a little shaken – I had so much to learn and little time to do so. However, I found some good tutorials and once I got started, it really wasn’t that hard.
Furthermore, teamwork has been going smoothly and we have been sticking to our initial team standards pretty closely. Communication and collaboration are consistent, and I feel lucky to have been assigned the teammates I have. Everyone is positive and hard-working, as well as flexible. We all have different experiences and areas of knowledge, and we try to help each other out when we can.
My Part of the Project
I took on the ‘user stuff’ part of our project, meaning things related to user creation, login/logout, and saved trips. My knowledge about user authentication was nil before the project, so there was a bit of a learning curve. I investigated using Next.JS and Flask libraries to handle authentication, but luckily, I was aware of Firebase Authentication from when I used Firebase services for another class.
Since our project has a rather tight deadline, it made more sense to me to use an existing service rather than spend a potentially long amount of time building something myself. It took a while to get everything going, but now users can successfully login and logout using their Google account, and that login state is passed to all components of the app. A personal stretch goal is adding more registration options, but it would be wiser to finish other parts of the project first.
User authentication is the most challenging part of the project that I’ve been assigned, so now that it’s up and going, my other responsibilities shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t expect it to take too long to add the ‘Trip’ component of the project, so I hope that will leave me more time to help refine our CSS styling.
The Overall Project
My teammates are making excellent progress, too. Currently, you can view experiences on the page, add a new experience, and search experiences by keyword and location. There are still a few kinks to work out, such as adding photos and geolocation, but I have to say that I’m impressed with how quickly things are coming together. Considering we still have about a month left, I’m sure we will finish the requirements on time and might even be able to add in a couple stretch goals. I’m eager to see how the project is going to turn out in the end!
