Bow Bites

Introduction of project

For my group’s final project in ICS 314, we were tasked with creating a website that would allow students to look up the food vendors available on campus. In particular, we wanted to allow people to see all of the vendors on campus, the types of food they offered, when they were open, and what the food products looked like (so they can judge before they buy). Students can assign favorite vendors for easy access, and there’s even an automated “show me what’s open” page that dynamically generates a list of open food vendors. We also built in an easy administration feature that allows vendors to edit their own pages, and for an admin account to manage all of the accounts together.

On this project, I worked with Cole Amparo and Henry Blazier - I highly recommend them to any employers looking for a recommendation, they both did amazing work and were great to work with. I learned a lot about becoming a better software devloper while working with them on this project.

My contributions

For this project, I designed and implemented the Vendor Profile Page (which shows all of the relevant information for a vendor such as the time they’re open and their menu),

the Available Now page (which shows the currently open and available vendors)

, and the Top Picks page (we decided to remove it due to feeling it was redundant with Available Now, so it wasn’t included in the finished product).

In addition, I also wrote the tests for these pages and helped to fix miscellaneous bugs in other parts of the project.

Lessons from project

During the course of this project, I learned a lot in how to work in a team and tackle a big project together. In particular:

• Make sure to split up commits in small and manageable chunks for a single task. I had a tendency to make a small number of large commits that changed many things at once, and several times, this led to nasty merge conflicts. It’s also harder to see the details in what I contributed at a point in time, and it’s not as apparent how the work evolved and transformed over time, which would’ve been really useful on a couple occasions where I was wondering where a code fragment was from that I’d introduced earlier.
• Assigning clear responsibilities makes managing a large project far more manageable. Compared to the Ninja Jump project, we had a clearer seperation of who was working on what, and it really paid off - even though this project was way more complex, it was way easier to handle our merging because of it.
• Meeting frequently to share ideas - we had a group meeting 2 or 3 times every week, and it was enormously helpful in making sure we were on the same page.
• Common coding standards - using eslint, we all used the same coding style, and it made it very easy to interchangeably work on pages the others had designed on or worked on as well.

I really enjoyed working on this project with my teammates, and I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish!