Heluna Manoa

I worked on a team with Kurt Kimura, Cade Kane, Zeb Lakey and Ryan Seng. Our group’s goal was to create a web application using Meteor that allows UH Manoa students to write course review for courses at UH Manoa. Not only did we work with Meteor, we also worked with MongoDB, as our application needed to have access to databases of professors, courses, and existing reviews. We each split up and did different parts/pages of the application, so my responsibility was creating the admin function pages. I created the pages that only exist for admin users that allow them to edit and remove a course listing.

Another one of my responsibilities was working on the styling for the web application. I wanted to do this because I thought that this was the most fun thing that I learned in the class. I played around with different navbar and footer settings and color schemas. I also worked on formatting the links on the navbar so they are spaced out legibly. Our group was able to create a full-fledged Heluna Manoa, with around 8 pages, in just one month. We were able to do this thanks to our excellent project management.

We managed the project via Github, using issue driven project management. This is to me my biggest takeaway from the project. Our group learned how to work as a group on a software development project on Github, where we pull from the main branch to create sub-branches used just to work on specific issues. Then, when we were done with those sub-branches we pushed them back to main to update our web application. It kind of makes me think of divide and conquer algorithms; we split up our main branch into many different smaller issues, and tackle those issues one at a time, and updating main as we go. I found the project management to be the biggest takeaway because it felt like we were software engineers at a firm working on a project. We met each week and we held each other accountable to ensure that we would have everything done by the deadline.

Before doing this project, I was doubting my ability to work in a team on projects like this. I lacked confidence. However, this project showed me that I am capable of doing this possibly for my profession. I think that with a little more independent learning and research, I can definitely be more comfortable with the idea of doing software development for my career. And, from now on, I think that’s my goal.

You can learn more about our project at the [(https://heluna-manoa.github.io/)].