CS467, the online capstone project course. This is my final course in OSU’s post-baccalaureate computer science program. In this class we are working in a team of three to complete a project from a select list of projects or propose a project to complete throughout the quarter. Here is my experience on the first two weeks of the course.
Back in week 1, we were supposed to form groups on our own and choose a project or be randomly placed in a group with a randomly selected project based on your top 5 projects. I elected to form a group of my own and choose a project. This seemed like the best thing to do to get the project I want to do. I felt like picking the project was the important part. So, I used canvas discussion to see if anyone wanted to join my group and work on the project I selected. I decided to choose the first two people who replied to my post. It doesn’t really matter to me who the people I work with are, whether it be two random or two people off of canvas discussion. It would still be random in a way for me. The project my team and I chose was a dating app for animal adoption. So, sort of like tinder but for animal adoption. I wanted to do this project because it seemed like it was a fun application to build.
Currently, in week 2, in addition to creating the team standard, my team discussed and came to a consensus on what type of app the team is building and what tech stack the team will use to build such an app. There are such a variety of different technologies a team can use to build an app it is good to agree on what to use before everyone starts doing research and writing code so we are not wasting time.
First, we decided what type of app we are building, a web or mobile. One approach we considered was to create a mobile app using flutter but we decided to do a web app because one of our members was not experienced with flutter.
Now that we knew we were doing a web app we had to choose what to use as a database, what to use for frontend and what to use for backend development. I googled what the most popular tech stacks are to build a web app and MERN and MEAN stacks were the most popular. Which is using mongoDB for the database, express and nodeJS on the backend, and react or angular to build the frontend. Everyone on my team only had experience with express and nodeJS.
Ultimately, we decided to use express and nodeJS for the backend, react for the frontend, and google cloud platform for the database. We opted to use GCP for the database since one of the team members was familiar with it and we decided to use react even though none of us were experienced with it because react is just a JavaScript library so it should be easier to learn than an entire framework like angular. Plus, react is supposed to make it easier to do frontend development. Now that we have established the tech stack, it is time for me to study up on these unfamiliar technologies.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for updates to my project’s progress.
