A lot of work

CS3216 is a lot of work. The first assignment is taking a lot of time, especially since I’m using a new framework I’m not too familiar with. Before we could even get settled, Assignment 2 was announced.

Our App

Our web application is a karang-guni app. It’s a platform where users give away stuff they don’t want anymore, to others who still find value in these unwanted items (e.g. old books, clothes, electronics). The catch? It’s all free. The application works completely on goodwill, and no money ever changes hands.

Division of labour

It wasn’t tough to decide who did what: Larry was the designer in the group so he took charge of the front-end; XuJie was the business guy so he looked into validating our idea and immediately started getting feedback from potential users; Patrick and I were left to handle the backend.

Technology Stack

We decided to use Node and Express for our backend, and Bootstrap + Materialize for frontend. There wasn’t any complicated cost-benefit analysis in deciding what we were going to use, we just went with what we were most comfortable with (in order to make sure we were able to get the app up as quickly as possible).

P.S. I actually had more experience using Flask and Python, but go with Node/Express since Patrick had used it before.

Plans

I think our idea is really cool! But right now we’re pretty much just hacking together the code just to get the app working. We’re incurring a lot of technical debt, which I expect will come back to haunt us when we get into refactoring the code.

Last Words

Mid-assignment submission is tonight, so I’m not gonna waste any more time on this. Bye.