Study Uhp Project

What is Study UHp?

Study Uhp is a website application that would help ICS students find tutors and allow tutors to make sessions that others can join. This would encourage students to meet face-to-face in the ICSspace and share knowledge. Heres also the source code.

Landing Page

This is the landing page for Study UHp which I was responsible for. It presented a new challenge in which I thought it would look nice and make more sense from a secure standpoint, to hide the navbar and footer. This way it has a similar aesthetic to a site like tumblr.com. It was found that this wasn’t as trivial as I thought. Aaron, one of my teammates had great ideas in which allowed us to make this possible. Working in my first team-based project, I usually don’t have that kind of help when it comes to figuring out a solution. We also thought we could make the Sign In, Sign Up buttons more inviting and interesting by ditching the bland flat color. So I found out how to use CSS and found many good resources in which I picked for the moving highlight. Also, it stays true to our theme as the mouse hovers over. We also found this cool parallax npm that we applied to the logo and makes more interactivity to the first thing that the user sees. Learning all the quirks when resizing the page helped me make it look more seamless, and overall learned alot from this part of the project.

 

Forms

I was also responsible for updating the uniforms for the add session, and edit session. However, this presented many issues for me as I learned that uniforms are more complicated when adding custom fields. I wanted to deviate from the simple template everyone was using, and I wanted to use a custom date selector called React DatePicker. The first problem is that it didn’t match uniforms format so with some CSS trickery I matched it pretty well. The other problem was formating the date, as it became difficult because at first, I wanted a day, start time, and end time for a session, which I achieved but later learned the site was refactored and it presented a new challenge as I had tried my best to figure out how to format the dates again removing the day field and making uniforms catch the errors. Other teammates had to change things that made my testing a bit more difficult, however, this is how things would be in a real-world environment anyways but before I could finish my issue, I needed to wait on some bug squashing done by my teammates. And I’m not complaining this just opened my eyes to things that I could request to be done differently, and how I could do better as a teammate as well. To be completely honest I was trying my best to get this issue done spending probably upwards to 30 hours trying to learn the intricacies with uniforms but it doesn’t have much documentation for custom stuff. So, unfortunately, I could not get this up to the master branch before the due date.

 

Maintaining home page

I also took a majority of the responsibility of updating the study-uhp.github.io page. That wasn’t all that hard. Keeping up with what we are going to do and what we did.

How I think about teammwork

Working in a team was a great experience for me as we used new tools to keep track of what needs to be done using Github organizations and making milestones with issues. I wish we could have met in person as I feel efficiency would improve tenfold, someone like me who isn’t as adept as others on my team could get a better understanding of concepts in person as it is easier to explain and demonstrate. Additionally seeing everyone work nearby and sharing ideas is where it’s at. Through discord or Zoom, it isn’t the same as ideas may be translated incorrectly which wastes more time in the long run. I wanted to do so much more with what I wanted to bring to the table, but I’d get stuck on these little bugs that would be a prick in my behind.

So how could I improve?

I think being my first team project, I am just not used to how others work. When I work alone, I know what I am touching and understand how things work as I coded them. But seeing others code that isn’t entirely clear made it difficult for me to understand. So to fix this I would probably request more commented work, or I need to get better at reading others code and understand their thought process behind it.