ManoaFixIt
App Homepage (desktop)
Manoa Fix It!
The ManoaFixIt Meteor application, our final project for ICS 311 (Software Engineering I), aims to aid all University of Hawaii at Manoa students to easily report any issues they find around campus such as damaged equipments or facilities without having to go through the trouble of contacting the authorities. With only few mouse clicks and keyboard strokes (or taps on your phone), this app enables users to electronically submit their issues which they can add descriptions and designate tags.
Submit Form (desktop)
After submitting an issue, the app adds it on a feed, displaying all other issues reported by other students. In other words, this app increases awareness to every existing problem on campus, thus making it faster to fix or solve them.
App Feed (desktop)
Furthermore, the app displays the location of the issues on a map. As you submit an issue, the app gathers the location of the user as the report was made and places a marker on the map so people else could see it for themselves.
Map Page (desktop)
What makes this project special is that it lives up to its main objective—to actually make reporting issues REALLY EFFICIENT. In other words, this app would be incomplete if it only works on desktop, both in aesthetics and functionality. As a result, we strived hard to make it function properly as well as appear very pleasing to look at on mobile devices.
App Feed (mobile)
My Contributions
For this project, I mainly worked on the front end side. I tried to make the app look pleasant while maintaining its supposed functionalities and responsiveness. I had to create the home page as beautiful as I could in order to catch the attention of anyone who uses this app. For instance, I worked on the landing page (or home page) and implemented the parallax scrolling to set up a unique atmosphere which indicates that this app is not just some ordinary application; it is something special which will prove useful for people in the future. To make the app even more unique, I created the logo from a website and tweaked it using GIMP, and I also made the custom map markers for the issues. Aside from managing the app’s aesthetics, I also implemented the app’s responsiveness on mobile phones—I added a sidebar to prevent the page from extending beyond the phone’s resolution. Apart from these, I also helped my groupmates from time to time, fixing bugs they assigned me and improving the user interface of any back end function they created.
What I Learned
In a Coding Sense
A lot of aspects in this project enabled me to exercise all the knowledge I have gathered throughout my journey in ICS 314. From implementing JavaScript functions to utilizing Semantic UI React to create a beautiful web page, I can definitely say I was excited to condense this knowledge into a physical display—the ManoaFixIt project. Working mainly as front end, I learned how to effectively use Semantic UI in a way that it makes the app very responsive and alluring to look at. In the middle of the semester, I had trouble setting up grids into their proper places, and I extremely loathed positioning certain images or elements in CSS. Thanks to this project, I learned how to get through those obstacles and even adopted new creative ways to implement them. Despite working on this end for most of the project, I was still very interested in the back end portion of our app. When I had the time, I reviewed the back end codes that my other groupmate wrote and was mesmerized how he manipulated the collections he made, and how he created amazing functionalities such as the map which is connected to the location of the submitted issue. Viewing all these intricate codes reminded me that I still have a long way to go if I were to do back end programming. Nevertheless, it encouraged me to keep trying to understand and emulate every back end codes that I encounter.
Beyond the Code
Working on the ManoaFixIt project has been a very important opportunity for me. I may have worked in another ICS group project before, but it fell short in terms of exposing the students to that professional environment as they were allowed to write a program which encompasses all the lessons taught. This type of group project ignores that fact that in actual jobs related in this field, there exists specific goals given to numerous split teams to complete as part of a grand project. The ManoaFixIt enabled me to submerge myself, for the first time, in a goal-driven project that starts from scratch and then systematically built, milestone after milestone. This project also furthured my knowledge on GitHub as I learned how to delegate separate branches to each member and also how to utilize some functions such as pull request, merging, creating issues, etc. Moreover, this project has inculcated to me that effective communication is a skill that must be trained as soon as possible. I have to learn how to deliberate ideas and set up goals with the other members in order to execute the project in a very organized and systematic process. Overall, I look forward to working in a similar project again, because while I am very proud of what I have contributed to my team, I still have a lot of ways to go as a software engineer.
From the bottom of my heart, I thank my groupmates Gian Calica and Adrian Au for allowing me to partake in this wonderful project.