I missed my last post due to being super busy and overwhelmed with my new job and our capstone project plan.
So, the new job. Let’s talk about it. So far it’s awesome and way better than my last job. I’m on the development team for the company’s 3 mains apps. They are all Ruby on Rails apps (something that I’ve never had any experience with) and right now I have almost no clue what’s going on, but it feels good! My coworkers are all super cool and helpful and I think I got really lucky scoring this gig. More to come as I learn this new framework and all of the other skills that go into being a software developer!
Onto the capstone project. It was a busy weekend for us. As a team, we probably spent a good 10 hours total in our MS Teams chat hashing out the scope of our app and the team responsibilities. It was a little rough and first but I think we have a solid plan now!
Here is an overview:
Our group will be developing a crowd-sourced shopping app for our capstone project. Our goal will be to create a simple and robust app with a large potential for expansion in the future. For the scope of this class however, the final app will focus on only meeting the basic requirements set forth in the project description. The app’s primary value proposition will be to provide users with a ‘best’ recommended store based on the items on their shopping list compared to crowd-sourced data of other users that has been uploaded at surrounding stores by other users. The database of item uploads and prices is appended to, when users scan barcodes of items in store, enter their prices, apply identifying tags, and upload directly to our database. Crowd-sourced data is inherently unreliable and one of the goals of the app will be to make uploading as simple as possible and done in such a way that the amount of data, and its potential uses, can be maximized. In addition, to incentivize users to create uploads, a reputation system is implemented where users obtain new titles as they reach certain numbers of price updates. Finally, users can post comments to a live feed, providing extra shopping information like store busyness, out-of-stock items, and other helpful details.
