A Helping Hand for those in need
Our Mission and the Team
This month I began working on a project for the organization Family Promise. Its an Organization that I personally enjoyed learning more about and I’m very happy I was able to contribute to. The mission of Family Promise is to aid people in need whether they are homeless, recovering from being homeless, or in need of aid before its too late. Its been a pleasure working with them, and helping them combat the homeless problem in our country is something I’m very proud of.
This Project was a month long effort with a team I enjoyed working with. I think like most people I have that fear of things like communicating with a new group of people, along with learning on the job, and trying to contribute as best as I can. Within the first day the fears were gone, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a team that communicated well and supported each other in a great way. We worked on a project that is ongoing, the project is a Web App that helps program and service managers track what caseworkers are offering to people in the field. It also allows case workers to log the services/program they offer. I contributed on the Front End alongside Cory Young, Jonathan Calderon, Monica Zwissler, Robert Allan, and Adam Purdy.
There is no I in team
We as a team worked along with the Back end and Data Science team to deliver features to the project we thought would help the Web App grow and be of more efficient. The first quest in our journey was looking over the code left behind by the teams that came before us, we also took the time to discuss what we felt was important to work on first. We met every day and decided what we would be working on that day and who would work on what aspect of the Web App, we also made sure to keep each other updated as we pushed code into our repository. As a team we made sure to communicate if we needed help and made sure to look over each others code in order to avoid bugs and conflicts within our code.
We started by adding tablet functionality to the web app and adding a User dashboard, I worked on creating a Table displaying the Services that Family promise offers. At first I was a bit nervous I didn’t have A lot of experience creating tables and I never worked with Ant Design before. The first thing I did was research Ant design and get an understanding of how and when to use it. I found Ant to be very useful and shared what I found with my team, then I started working on the table. We decided to have a table in the user dashboard because we thought as a Case worker it would be useful to have that information at our finger tips once we logged in. We then worked on the design making sure to follow our roadmap and make the App pleasing in tablet form. We made decisions like having all of our tabs showing on the navbar instead of having a hamburger styled menu, we found while using the previous format the functionality wasn’t as responsive as we liked. Although its a small issue in terms of functionality the hamburger styled looked better then it worked causing us to go with the other option. We worked with the backend team to have the End points we need to have the table working along with other features we were working on.
As a team we worked together to complete the goals we set fourth. We expected to use a good amount of our time researching and learning to code some of the features we wanted to work on. In order to accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time we shared resources as well pair programming and sharing what we learned in our meetings. Once we started to implement we continued communicating and working as a team to keep the momentum we had.
The Experience
In the end we added a functioning User dashboard and Tablet optimizations as well as visualization like Tables. During the journey I learned a lot not just from a technical standpoint but also in terms of team work, time management, and communication. Overall as a team including Back end and Data Science we were able to make the Back end more robust as well as create metrics and leave behind a Web App the next team could build upon even more. I’m happy with what we have done and am proud of what we were do for a great organization like Family Promise.
During this past month I believe I have grown significantly, I’ve learned its okay to rely on the people around me and I learned when you work together as a team you learn from each other. This month has also made me a better developer it allowed me to learn Ant design while also reinforcing what I have already learned in the months leading up to this. Its also made me think about my goals in this field, before this month I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of environment I’d like to work in as well as what kind of projects I would like to work on. I was set on working on Projects that focused on my hobbies like music, video games, anime, etc. but now I have a more open mind. It was nice using what I learned for a good cause. In terms of environment I learned I really enjoyed working as a Team and bouncing ideas off each other, I’m a social person but in the past when I would code a lot of times I would put on music and type away but now I can see myself working in more team driven environment.