At the start of the quarter the thought of building an entire application from start to finish seemed like an unattainable task. From identifying the user stories we’d need to solve to architecting the system to actually delivering a working MVP it felt like we would need at least 6 months to make any realist progress. Fortunately once we started putting digital pen to paper thing started to move pretty quickly! In fact as we approach the half-way point of the quarter we have a working frontend mobile app and a functional backend powered that can accept images, classify them and return a functional analysis of their recyclability status. This far exceeds anything I thought we’d have built by now and makes me incredibly excited to build the next stage as I can tangibly see what we need to do next to continue improving our product.
While I am feeling confident in my team and the work we’ve been doing I do feel there are a couple areas we could improve. First when it comes to executing code reviews and pull-requests we have not done the best job of formally reviewing / approving each others work. This has worked ok so far as we have a pretty well defined separation of work, but as our projects become more integrated it will be more important for us to review each others work to avoid merging any code that breaks downstream dependencies. Additionally while it is not a requirement I haven’t actually written any code for our mobile frontend yet. As I have no experience writing Flutter apps I would like to take on the scope to build a single feature in the app so that I can start to build up my experience here before the end of the quarter.
Overall as I look forward to the next half of the course I am confident that our project is on track to succeed. In fact I believe that we are going to be able to build a functional and complete system that I would be proud to share with my friends and family! Ultimately we’ll see how I feel when we’re finishing this in 30 days.
Leave a Reply