My team’s project (Cloud-based 911 Risk Analysis) has shifted slightly from original expectations into an “Integration and Test” project. We are working with an industry contact in continuing the work of last quarter’s team’s project (that’s a mouthful). In essence, we are taking a handful of pieces and trying to put them back together inside a better architecture, and then test and improve upon its processes.
Our codebase technologies are, understandably so, pretty limited to the platforms that the previous team chose. Our front end is a React app and our backend is an ASP.NET Core app. While I believe it to be the case that our whole team would love to redo the prior team’s work in Django/Flask or others, I think this will be a fun challenge with a lot of learning moments along the way. Where our team gets to chart our own path is with our selection of cloud-based platforms, data handling solutions, and CI/CD tools. Our largest task at the moment is consolidating the previous teams’ work onto a single cloud service provider. Our industry contact prefers AWS, and so we have chosen to host the front end on Amplify due to its previous use, cost-effectiveness for our industry contact, flexibility and ease of use. Our backend will likely also be hosted on AWS amplify, and will be supported with an AWS DynamoDB connection. We chose DynamoDB for this project due to its non-relational nature as well as the ease in scaling in the future. Our app will be storing relatively large amounts of geospatial data as well as eventually allow for customer data uploading which may require our database to deal with inconsistencies in schema items. At the present moment, this project is daunting.
In terms of design modularity, it has been difficult to be productive while working independently as we have struggled to work with the previous group’s code. We are all working on individual pieces of the overall project, but most of us are hitting roadblocks working around deprecated features, current configuration, and how everything fits together. That being said, we are laying the ground work for strong modularity and the ability to handoff this project effectively to the next group by implementing CI/CD pipelines with Github Actions and Docker. It will truly be a weight off all of our shoulders when these pipelines and the starting point of the app is in place.
I don’t think any of us imagined we would be working on top of a previous capstone group’s work and it presents unique challenges and limitations… what better way to learn?
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