Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been wrestling with setting up user login and authorization using Google Cloud Services. More than anything I’ve worked on, this project has made me appreciate how important it is to find a way to go out and try to apply everything you’ve learned to reinforce it. I thought that taking care of authorization would be easy! I’d done it before in CS493 in multiple projects. However, I quickly realized that the cloud course involved only a simple server-side application, while my group is developing a web app with a front-end and a hosted database. I’ve been desperately trying to expand my simple experience to my group’s project, and it’s been an incredible challenge.
The API that I was familiar with is soon to be deprecated, and I’ve had to learn a new set of methods that currently have minimal documentation. It’s been an enjoyable learning experience, and an interesting lesson in the way that larger projects can be held back by unsuspected problems. In order for my team to integrate all of the endpoints that we need for the various pages in our web page, the user must be associated with all database queries. I’ve felt a bit more pressure to complete my portion of the project to not hold up development. Perhaps for the first time during this degree, I’m experiencing a work-like feeling of tough time-constraints. This has been a welcome feeling during the final few weeks of the term, and I’m looking forward to more struggles and puzzles to solve over a long career.
