My capstone team has spent the last 2 weeks has been comprised of getting to know each other and our respective backgrounds, setting up a guidelines regarding communication with one another, and lastly, taking the first steps toward beginning to realize our project by setting up repositories and workspaces.

When working on a project such as this, it is easy to get sucked into coding as that is where the fun is. However, building a larger scale web application such as the one our team has selected requires more organization and coordination, especially when working in a team. Our plan of attack is as follows.

One teammate is owning the backend side of our application and will be utilizing the following technologies:

• Spring Boot – Java-based application development framework
• Hibernate – Object Relational Mapping tool for Java
• PostgreSQL – Relational database management system
• Swagger UI – REST API documentation tool
• AWS Cognito – Identity and access management service
• Amazon S3 – Cloud object storage
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Application deployment orchestration service

Myself and another teammate will be completing the frontend side of our application with React, a frontend JavaScript library.

In addition, we have decided to utilize the following technologies for project management and communications.

• GitHub – Distributed version control (Separate repos for backend and frontend)
• Jira – Issue and project tracking system
• Discord – Social media platform for hosting asynchronous messaging as well as scheduled synchronous meetings

We have divvied up all necessary tasks for the first week and have created task/user stories in Jira to track our progress.

Now that the groundwork has been laid, my teammates and I are excited to begin coding the initial, broadly used components of our web application and see the first elements begin to come to life. Time to get to work!