General Assembly Project 3 - JobWatch

Deployed Project Link

JobWatch is a SPA app to keep your job search organised. It was our third project at General Assembly. This project was done in a team and was our first attempt at building a full stack web application. This Project was done over ~10 days.

Team members

• Silvio Brentan
• Leslie Cayas
• Adan Moses

Task Brief

• Build a full-stack application
• Use an Express API
• Implement thoughtful user stories
• Be deployed online

Technologies Used

• JavaScript (ES6)
• HTML5
• CSS3
• Node.js
• Express
• Postgres
• Axios
• Npm
• Bcrypt
• GitHub
• Trello
• Heroku

Overview

At the beginning of this project we spent half a day brainstorming ideas and potential concepts for the web application. In the end we unanimously ended up settling on a design which allowed users to track jobs applications and various details. We had a lot of influence and inspiration from Trello website. The core functionality of the application is based around Users.

Process

1. We spent the first half a day brainstorming and coming up with project ideas.
2. After settling on our idea we began to build up our back end models and schema.
3. We wireframed the user journey and each of the pages that we wanted to include.
4. One of our group (Leslie Cayas) then mocked up some prototype designs.
5. We then split our duties amongst the group with separation of front end and back end.
6. We next started on the back end. With our focus on building out the models, views and controllers.
7. At first we simply got the functionality to work on the front end and then once the correct data was being pulled through and most of the functionality was present we moved onto styling and design.
8. The final stage was to upload the project to Heroku


Design Ideas

We used Trello throughout the process as our project management tool. Each morning we would group up and talk one by one about what we'd achieved the day before, what we thought still needed to be done and then we'd add any extra cards to the Trello board based on what we thought we needed to do. We would then each claim a couple for the day and try to make sure that we weren't encroaching on any files that each-other were working on to avoid merge conflicts.

Challenges

One of the trickiest parts of the project for me was the user sessions. It was tricky to write code to have a new user sing-up and also automatically log-in within the same function. I've managed to get it working with a combination of user validation functions, user controllers and session controllers.

Key Learnings

Many of my takeaways from this project were about coding as a team. This was my first time using Github with multiple people editing one repository. Learning to avoid merge conflicts, trying to make sure that we were aware of what each other were working on and who was using which files. This project was also an exercise in project planning and expectation management. We planned very well but even then only just managed to pull off the scope that we wanted as we were very ambitious with the project. We went in with lots of great ideas but ended up having to shelf many of them due to time constraints.