This week I will be discussing the current state of my capstone project for CS467. Back in March before the class had even started, I made a post on the OSU Online CS subreddit seeking partners for the project. I figured if I could find other people who were thinking about capstone before the class had even started, they would make great partners. Pretty soon I found 2 people with similar schedules and ideas about the project, and we decided to form a group.
When it came time pick a project, we were kind of all over the place. I think everyone had great ideas but once we started to discuss details, we quickly realized that the scope/requirements of the project would require way more than 1 quarter to implement (and likely an entire team of engineers). Eventually we all agreed to commit to a list of 5 projects that were provided by the instructors and we were assigned the “Help Save Craigslist” project. I was really happy with this outcome because I knew this project utilized a lot of the knowledge we had learned in web development, software engineering, and databases. However, it still left room for us to learn more through developing a cross-platform app as a team, implementing user authentication, and utilizing Amazon for backend services.
This week, my group submitted our Team Standards document which lays out…you guessed it, the standards to which we will hold ourselves accountable. More specifically, we set our project goals, communication expectations, set up a repo, and decided on using Jira for project management. The next step in the process will be quite a bit more involved as we have to put together a project plan.
Putting together this project plan is quite daunting. First, we must decide which languages and libraries we will be using. For the front end, we’ve agreed that Flutter is the way to go because we all have experience with it and it is cross-platform. At this point, we have not yet laid out the backend and have had little discussion on it. At a minimum, I know that we will need to implement a RESTful API that allows for CRUD operations on user accounts and a user’s craigslist posts. Additionally, we will need to incorporate OAuth for user authentication which could be challenging. Finally, we will need to utilize Amazon S3 for image storage. Wow – that’s a lot‼
Stay tuned for next week when I discuss how our project planning went!
