Introduction
Hello everyone reading this! In this blog post, I intend to share what I consider to be my most significant accomplishment in our course till now (this could definitely change within the next week or so). It’s centered around my collaborative efforts with the team on our SafeSave project while maneuvering through contrasting time zones and packed schedules (with seemingly no end in sight for all of the sprints and other courses’ deadlines).
Collaborating With a (somewhat) Distributed Team
Teamwork can be challenging, particularly when each member is situated in different geographic locations with me being situated in Alabama in Central Time Zone, while my other three group members are living in California in Pacific Time Zone). We had to come up with optimal timings for joint sessions which was quite a different from my previous experience with a coding group project, as I was in a coding bootcamp that had a routine where fixed times were allotted for all activities, so planning time wasn’t an issue (not that it was a significant issue here). The situation demanded flexibility and patience ensuring everyone’s schedule could somewhat align despite varying timelines, deadlines, and time zone differences.
The Technical Milestone: Unifying Frontend & Backend
A notable highlight for me occurred when I was successfully able to get the frontend of the application to integrate with the backend / database side, for a few of the form located on the frontend. Our app SafeSave required more than just typical fields like website credentials – username, password etcetera for creating saved logins, as an example of this issue that was remediated. To enable precise user data storage and transmission to our database, I need to add additional details (or fields such as the time created, the time updated, and the time accessed) incorporated effectively into these frontend forms or else a significant amount of functionality would be lacking from our group’s application.
Lessons Learned About Technology And Myself
This endeavor provided me with a lot of learning opportunities both personally and technologically speaking. JavaScript emerged not only as an aesthetic enhancement tool but also proved resourceful in facilitating server-side functionalities seamlessly integrating ExpressJS & ReactJS frameworks highlighted their compatibility within such projects (as JavaScript was what the whole application was built on). On a personal note, I learned that working collectively is very much a different mindset than doing some sole coding, something that I can say I thought I already knew, but learned to a greater extent over the progression of this course.
Conclusion
To close out this post, I’d say that this journey had a few challenges but nothing major or insurmountable that we couldn’t all learn from or take away from for future courses or even for our professional careers. Navigating communications between individuals hailing from different background, professions, and locations was interesting yet not as easy as it would be if we were all in person, on-campus.
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