Web development for a cause
Bridges to Prosperity is a non profit organization whose goal is to transform isolated communities by building foot bridges for them that will grant them easier and safer access to facilities such as health care, education, economic opportunities etc. It is an exciting opportunity as a new developer to get the chance to work for a “real world” company, and apply what I know.
Our part as developers is to build them a fully functional application that allows users to understand the impact they have been able to make through the use of an interactive map that grants the user access to a birds eye view of the overall work that Bridges to Prosperity has had on these rural communities. This includes information such as pictures of the bridges built, stats on community impact and people served, future prospects for bridges, ones that are under construction etc.
My major concern, and fear walking into this project was that its breadth and scope would be too much for me to handle as a novice developer. But this fear quickly subsided as we began to delve further and further into the project.
We broke down our roadmap by brainstorming what we thought should be done next with our application. There was already a solid amount of functionality built in through the map. But we knew we wanted to expand on that. So we met up as a group several times, and came up with a plan. We then took the ideas we wanted to implement and put them up on our Trello board and each decided on what task we wanted to work on individually.
Our Trello board was a great tool to use. It has helped us stay on task, find work to do when we feel lost, and understand where we are as a group. It has been very helpful.
Teamwork Teamwork Teamwork!!! And contributions!
So far my primary contributions to my teams work and progress on our project for Bridges to Prosperity have included connecting our front to our backend, making sure we have all the relevant and up to date information and pictures that are available, and I am currently in the process of making a photo gallery for all of the pictures we have available so the user can scroll through the bridges that have been built. I have modified the pictures so that they fit better into their prospective positions, and don’t come through grainy and stretched.
The photo that you see on the left hand side and the information presented just below that are all part of what I was able to contribute to the project so far. The old backend we were pulling from did not have the most up to date information. And we wanted to make sure that all the current information presented was relevant, and we were not using out of date info. I wish I had an example of the photo gallery I have been building but it is still “under construction”. And I am currently having trouble getting it built out, but it is a problem I am currently solving.
There have been a few problems we have encountered as a team, and it has been a positive experience working together to figure them out. One of them was a problem we had while connecting the new back end to the front end we are building. The problem came in the form of the images we needed not showing up, and a failure of some of the relevant information to come up as well. After doing some digging and inspecting our problem we realized that the back end needed to have certain sets of information input as integers instead of strings, so that was a relatively easy fix. Just required a few quick changes on the new API and a quick re-deploy to heroku. The image problem was a little more complicated. There were no images showing up at all. And we realized that part of the problem was that they were not coming in as ‘jpg’ images. For some reason the ‘g’ was missing from the end. This required some more work, and extra help to be brought in for a solution to be found. After about an hour of trouble shooting we were able to fix this problem as well.
Above you can see the integers we needed to be put in place. They were originally coming through as strings. And because of this we were being thrown errors, and were not able to grab the necessary info.
Another problem we are currently facing is the proper implementation of an image carousel. My teammate and I are currently in the process of sorting that out by building a new back end endpoint, and creating a new page for it, and making a new component and route so the user can access the page. We are currently in the middle of solving this problem, and should be all done here very soon. He is currently working on the back end while I focus on creating the component and route for our carousel feature.
Where we are now
At this point our product is all but fully developed. Although there are features I wish had met full functionality, and come to fruition, the product itself has come to a point of solid functionality, and does exactly what we wanted to achieve. We have been able to bring many different features to our application. What used to be just a map with some simple info has become full fledged application that is dynamic and informative, it is more than just simple map with markers as its primary component. We have developed a fully functional navigation bar, that links to a variety of information such as learning more about the non profit, making donations, partnering, and taking action. We have achieved full functionality when it comes to our new back end being connected to our front end in terms of relevant information, pictures available to the user, and the ability to bring new information to the site. We have made sure all the information for the bridge markers makes sense, and is up to date with the data base.
The future of this product contains a little bit of cleaning and maintenance. Some of the styling is not exactly where we want it to be such as the components that contain the information for the gallery. I believe that it will only take some time tinkering on the front end to fix such problems. Some of the technical challenges I foresee for future prospects is that we need to fill in the “photo gallery functionality”, add some styling to the page so it is not so bland, and fully implement some features such as adding a new bridge, and making sure we give them the admin capabilities to do so, and possibly implementing redux.
This project has certainly been sobering in terms of realizing my weak points and strong points in my field of study. Some of the feedback I have received from peers is that I need to take the time to evaluate what I need to do ahead of time. I tend to jump into things without a plan and just start tinkering away. Which has times where it works, but certainly has times where it does not too. I would greatly benefit by taking the time to come up with more of a plan ahead of time.
This project has furthered my career goals by understanding what it really looks like to work with a team and take the time to communicate with people, plan what we need to do, develop a set of goals, and delegate them properly. It has given me insight into my future, and what my career path will look like.
