“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
– Abraham Lincoln
The school quarter is solidly into Week 3 and things are ramping up! This week my Capstone group finished up our very detailed Project Plan. I believe we did a fantastic job that only sets us up for success. We spent quality time describing how a user would interact with our mobile app, detailing the frontend, backend, and database interactions, and assigning individual task assignments from now until project completion. It took a while to complete all of this, but it will definitely be beneficial in the long run. We have a schedule as well as an outline to refer to during this development cycle, which makes the goal of building the app less daunting. However, I’m pretty excited about all of the new technologies I will learn.
It seems like each week I will be pushing myself by learning a new technology. Although I have experience with React.js, I do not have experience with React Native. I do have some experience with Python/Flask to build a simple microservice, but I don’t have experience using Python/Flask to make database calls.
Something that really caught my eye this week was the tool Figma, used to build the mobile app prototype. Another team member built the prototype so I did not fully use the tool myself, but now I want to learn. The tool allows you to design all visual aspects of how a mobile app would look, even including the keyboard that appears when you need to input text into forms. Figma also allows you to simulate a user ‘walking’ through the app as if you were interacting with the buttons on a particular page. I believe having this prototype is critical to implementing our app efficiently.
To ensure our progress continues to flow smoothly, I’ll be working on setting up my React Native environment and completing some simple tutorials. I’m hoping my previous experience building a simple web app with React.js will transfer over. I’ve also been using React.js in my internship, which is a nice refresher for this project, especially since I was able to receive feedback from and work with more experienced professionals. In turn, I hope my experience with this Capstone project will benefit my progress at work. To conclude, I hope to report back next week with new skills I’ve acquired in React Native.
