The Woes of Professional Work
09 Dec 2021This entire ICS 414 experience was a wild ride from beginning to end. From understanding the client’s requests to the delegation of work, finding a happy middle ground in the chaos that is this semester really was a challenge for my team. Ultimately, we came out of the project with what I felt was a spectacular website and I have zero qualms with how my whole expereince went.
Hawaii Home Project
Our clients for this project was a local group of medical dispensaries called Hawaii Home Project. They gave us a presentation of their current practices and the programs that they use to handle their supplies, which can be summed up as excel sheets to hold their data and google forms to track their subscriptions. Going into this, it felt like a rather simple implementation of what we learned in 314 as well as my own experiences in RadGrad, but the more that my team and I worked on the project, the vision as to what our end product would look like evolved. What we thought was going to be a glorified excel sheet website, became our fully functioning website, Aeneas.
The A-Team
Like any good project, a spectacular team is the bare minimum, and I am proud to say that I had the best team to go through it all with. The groups were split up between 7-8 people which is more than usual when working on just one project such as this. The problem was not “who should work on what,” but instead “how to delegate work beteen so many people.” Breaking the ice is a necessity when working with people you have zero knowledge with and from day 1, making a dynamic where we can talk to each other as friends definitely helped our cooperation skills. Using the first milestone as our baseline for how people work, we were able to understand each other’s strengths and ultimately choose tasks amongst ourselves that well help our workflow go smoothly. There were a few hiccups with some team members working a bit less, but ultimately I think everyone in my team contributed in their own unique was to create a fine end product.
Milestone 1: The Vision
I like to break up my summaries of the 6 milestones into three parts as they seem to have uniquely different goals and problems attached to each part. Our first 3 milestones found us figuring out how we should design our website and what specifically we wanted as functions that would satisfy our client’s wishes. We knew that it had the qualities of an excel sheet with added functionalities to more easily access the supply database. Upon initial task creations, we had trouble figuring out how to delegate work because our group wanted our mock up website to be decenty functional with the first milestone. We started off with the necessary tasks like creating specific pages and the collections for what we think the “inventory.” The rest of the necessary tasks were just small additions to fill up the quota. However from the beginning, it felt like our website had a definite vision and our first iteration of the website showed this with fully functioning pages with searchability and set goals alongside them.
Milestone 2-3: Setbacks and Inspiration
With the feedback from the clients, we knew ways to improve our website, however we ran into major problems from the get go. Realizing that we used the wrong template to base off our website, this caused major setbacks as it mean that it changed how each page worked and more importantly how the collections of our inventory was going to function. This stumped us for the first couple of weeks into milestone 2, but after gritting our teeths we went to work to transferring all our hard work into this new template and working ways around reimplementing our functions. Some were simple, others tooks subsequent milestones to figure out solutions to them, but it was all in the process of making a website our clients will like. Alongside this sudden change, we came up with our name for the project, Aeneas, one of the legendary heroes of Troy in the Greco-Roman mythology. Throughout the bulk of these two milestones, we were able to find our bearings and even add new functionalities like our dispensing as well as the implementations of the log history. From this point on it felt like smooth sailing, but there was definitely more to come.
Milestone 4-6: Final Designs and Unique Qualities
I think for most groups that milestone 4 through 6 is where each project took uniquely distinct paths with designs and functionality for the websites. It is clear that everyone took inspiration from each other due to the similar usage of dispensing or even the log histories, but besides that, there are tons of special features we’ve added to our website that makes it different. For one, we’ve added a report function that allows our client to record a list of needed medications that are either low supply or expiring into a csv file, which doesn’t seem to be added. Another feature is the steps towards having a mobile app by converting the navbar to a sidebar upon detection of a smaller screen like a tablet.
Although it’s not a full mobile implementation, it still gives necessary functionality in the case of needing to use a phone or table to add items if necessary. Overall, the final product of our website came out extremely well and I’m proud that my team made a product that our clients definitely enjoyed.
Learning on the Fly
Although this project was a very fun experience, there was so much that I had learn about myself and my teammates in order to make this project a success. We are a pretty social team that is okay with making weekly meetings to talk about our own individual progress and to go over things outside of ICS 414, but there wasn’t much of a outstanding speaker for the group. I took it upon myself to be somewhat of the spokesperson whenever we are doing milestones, so I quickly learned how to communicate our bi-monthly changes in a concise and informative matter in addition to being able to answer questions on the fly.
With new functionalities came the challenges of learning new API’s that were very enjoyable to handle. This project also taught me humility to ask others for help when I’m having trouble with tasks that I otherwise won’t be able to figure out by our deadlines. There is more we can improve on the website and much more functionality we can add, but this whole project was an exercise of priorities and making sure the most important features are there.
Overall, I had so much fun with this project and I hope that I can use these skills that I learned in my future jobs. You can see a deployment of the site here and see the github repository over here