Today I wanted to talk about the midpoint reflection of our capstone project progress so far.

This quarter I am assigned to a crowdsourced fitness app group where our team decided to use React Native framework to develop the app. The challenging part of it is that only one of the team members is used to React Native, the rest of the team is not, and our goal is to make a fully functional react native app in a matter of few weeks. As a result, our leading team member took a significantly bigger chunk of the workload in the development process while the rest of us are pretty much struggling with smaller development work. As a native flutter user, I found my first two weeks completely spent on setting up the react-native environment, struggling with solving and googling a variety of installation errors. It is also quite frustrating to deal with the lint merge errors all the time prior to GitHub merging (some struggling screenshot)

Starting the third week I was able to see progress by setting up a few UI elements on some of the screens.

In the fourth week, I was able to implement a screen and add a tab to the existing tab controller. Although I felt like I was able to make progress and started getting a hang of the framework, it is not comparable pace to the desired team pace our leading teammate wanted.

I really appreciate taking this capstone project as an opportunity to learn using a different development framework – React Native, it is quite stressful most of the time not to be able to keep up with the speed of our leading teammate wanted.

At the point of midpoint review, the bigger chunk of the work has already been done and only UI elements need some work. I am still figuring out how to complete the conditional rendering of my chat users to make the chat feature only available to specific challenge participants.