Overview
In the summer of 2021, I worked on a startup called Traded which is an E-commerce platform where college students can buy and sell items to other college students on campus. I was in charge of developing frontend UI’s as well as connecting it to a backend that the team can use. The executives showed me sample screens that they wanted me to implment on Marvel and met with me weekly to discuss the progress of the project. I was the only person on the development team.
I had no experience in Web/Mobile development so there was steep learning curve I had to overcome. For the first month, I spent most of my days teaching myself how to use React Native and Firebase by looking through the documentations to understand how to integrate it as a BaaS(Backend as a Service). Then, I inplmented over 10 screens involving the app that was consistent with the style and UI that the executives wanted. While implementing these screens, I incorporated the logic for connecting the screen UI’s and different functionalities executives specified in meetings. I used Firebase Auth to authenticate the users on the app and was able to store I was able to store data for users and product information using Firestore and images on Firebase Real Time Database.
Takeways
After taking Principles of Software Engineering here at Vanderbilt, I learned different Agile methodologies to ensure that the project gets finished on time. Because the startup was ran by college students, I believe that we overlooked many product development / software engineering methodologies such as a product road map, Gantt chart, and Sprints to help estimate development time and have full transparency between the client and the development team. Another thing that slowed down developement time was that I was the only developer that was working on the project at the time because the team did not have any resources to hire another developer. Going into the project with another developer would have made it easier to split tasks ex. one person works on the frontend and the other person works on the backend. Overall, it was a good experience to get used to coding in Javascript. It also opened my eyes to different tech stacks, the pros/cons of different stacks, and why you should use one stack over the other depending on your situation. It also gave me perspective of estimating the duration it takes to complete a task when communicating with the client.