Tortee | Bootcamp Mentor Support App

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INTRODUCTION

At the midpoint of the 16 week School of Code bootcamp, we were given a brief to develop a full stack application that addresses a specific problem faced by fellow bootcampers. Our goal was to improve their overall experience of bootcampers, e.g. focusing on things like remote learning, knowledge retention, or collaboration.

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OUR APPROACH

We scoped out the week as follows:

• Day One: Problem discovery, research, problem refinement and user personas
• Day Two: Solution Discovery, MVP definition, Wireframes/Design and User Stories
• Day Three & Four: Finalised design and build
• Day Five: Demo Day

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MY TEAMMATES

• Joe O'Donovan
• Rikiah Williams
• Hannah Thorley
• Alexander Brown
• Cal Woodford
• Me (Liz Robson)

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DEFINING THE PROBLEM AND OUR SOLUTION

During the brainstorming session, we discussed problems that we and other bootcampers were having and an area which came up were the meetings with our nominated mentors, often struggling to get the most out of the sessions. We therefore came up with an idea for an app to help bootcampers get more from their sessions, with icebreaker questions if they were struggling with knowing what to say, a note taking section to store their thoughts on the meetings and technical questions to ask your mentor, based on what you had been studying that week.

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TECH STACK

The key priority for the project was to showcase all the technical skills and knowledge we had built up over the first half of the bootcamp and therefore steered us to use the below technologies:

• HTML
• Javascript
• CSS
• Express
• PostgresSQL

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MY KEY CONTRIBUTIONS

• Connecting the front and back-end as a priority early on
• Building a local JSON file to call an icebreaker topic at random and display it on the app
• Using Express.js to set up the connection to the database
• Setting up CRUD functionality to access the PostgresSQL database
• Working on the front-end styling in CSS
• Ensuring no one got left behind in their understanding of our code and that we all got to work on every aspect of the codebase

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CHALLENGES WE FACED

We had issues deploying the project to Render at the end of the project due to our front-end and back-end being linked together. We were able to resolve the situation by doing more research, thoroughly reading the documentation and deciding to split the front and back-end code.

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WHAT WE WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY

• More efficient use of time, breaking into smaller teams when solving issues
• Review the team manifesto every morning and check in with everyone
• Ensure all data is in on - we had some locally in a JSON file and other data on a PostgresSQL database
• Deploying early and use a CI/CD approach

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WHAT'S NEXT FOR TORTEE

Create a section where you can take notes for each mentor session and refer back to them which we weren't able to complete

Meeting scheduler with your mentor to see each other's availability

Make it a space for mentors as well as mentees as a place for collaboration

Create two types of login - one for mentees and one for mentors

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INSTALLATION

Clone down the repo:

git clone https://github.com/liz-robson/SoC-midterm-project/tree/main


Install dependencies:

npm i