Taste of Manoa

Manoa Munchies is a Web Application which targets students apart of the University of Manoa. Manoa Munchies is an application designed to allow users to find food items and the associated vendor’s location in relation to the user. It also allows users to save, like and rate items which can be viewed by other users allowing friends to know what each friends want. The app also describes each of the vendors and their hours of operations. The second major concurrent project was also a documentation of the project development. This provided the incredible experience for us to guide other people on not only how to do this if they wanted to but also to learn one powerful way to organzie a presentation that may be necessary in future career work. To learn more, click on this link to Manoa Munchies.

There were three members of this team, with implementation tasks divided amongst members by preference. One task I ended up doing including refactoring naming conventions for a more logical, streamlined and functioning application. Other tasks included creating a couple database collections that would include both the construction of the collection, and a base collection set to run and test functionality of the application. Another task that all members were responsible for was to fix any issues that caused application crashes or failure of collection population in the web app. Lastly, every member was expected to be able to help with the development process which didn’t necessarily mean implementation but also planning and brainstorming ideas for possible application formatting and the like.

This project provided a lot of experience when dealing with a large scale project. Management becomes a very important concept to consider when dealing with multiple people working on so many different files which may or may not interfere with another members work. The first of these includes task management. Making sure to not step on other users by making separate branches utilizing github. This also assures that new implementations can be tested before being thrown into the master code assuring new additions don’t damage existing ones. Another thing that became a universal problem for our group was naming convention. We noticed things weren’t logical from one person to another, and did not maintain consistent naming throughout variables or directories and such, requiring full system renaming which can become time consuming and problematic.

The biggest challenges I dealt with personally included trying to create something from scratch. Creating a new collection wasn’t that hard, although it still took considerable amount of time. It was figuring out what exactly that collection affects and how to make it do what needs to be done. Functionality was always something that could easily trip me, and then trying to get it into the correct format with the right naming convention was difficult to be consistently successful. In addition to dealing with functionality, I had trouble managing the amount of time I was able to spend working on this project. With the project in full charge by late mid semester, it become increasingly difficult to allot equal time with several other classes also coming to a close and each requiring an equal work load.

One thing I learned from doing a project like this is that there really is no end. You begin with an idea, make some temporary mockups, and fill in some functionality. After you start adding implementations, new ideas come to pass and more tasks required to finish. And as your required to present progress at some deadline, you do as much of these before each deadline. The work continues to build, but the time to complete it all doesn’t. It provides great insight to what actual start-ups and major businesses go through and are expected to do when developing something, easily proving why problems and bugs tend to arise from new products.