This project was an interesting project to have worked on as not only does it have the goal of helping the environment, it also has the goal to change the behavior and the mindset of the person. That made it an exciting project to contribute towards as I felt as though it was my chance to make my own contribution towards the goal of saving the environment.
Besides the feeling of making an impact towards society and even to people’s daily lives, I felt that this project was a glimpse towards what working at a company would feel like. Although I am not claiming they are the same, I felt as though that this would give me a small taste as to what I my career path could be like. This is because I will not be working on a project and building it from the ground up all alone, but rather I was going to be working with other people and only working on certain features and aspects of the project. This made the development cycle much different than what I was used to as I no longer had to worry about working on everything by myself, but I could delegate aspects of the project to others.
During the start of the development process, I undertook the task of creating the dashboard page of the project. Although there was pressure for it as the dashboard was going to be the main feature of the project, I still decided that I would want to work on it because I wanted to challenge myself with something that would force me to learn new concepts. Another reason was that I wanted to try to use and reinforce what I learned from a previous internship where I worked for a little bit on dashboard widgets that contained various types of graphs in order to display data from a satellite.
During the development process, I encountered a difficulty of picking an API that I could use to display the graphs. I tried various graphing API’s such as Nivo Rocks, React-Vis, Victory, Recharts and ChartJS, but I did not really feel as though it had the features I was looking for in order to have the graphs that I wanted to have for the project. In the end, I ended up using Plotly as our project’s graph API due to the ease, the aesthetic,and the many interactive features available to use for the graphs that the end-user can use.
Overall, I think I have improved as a developer by the end of the project. Learning how data gets pulled from the database and onto the client side page was a very rewarding experience as it forced me to learn how the front-end and back-end works together to give a seamless experience to the user. I also thought that getting to work on a project with others was a great experience as well because it would reflect a real-world job much more accurately. The project was a very exciting opportunity for me to take that small step into a software engineering career and I am truly grateful that the project had a client we had to work for because it gave the project a sense of “realness” as opposed to made-up scenarios.