Week of June 23rd

What an awesome week! I spent it working with Ystallonne on the layout and UI of our website. He knows a lot more about interface design than I do so it was a good learning experience. We tried to keep the look and feel similar to the main Seneca website so users feel familiar with our system. A mockup can be found here. Fardad approves of the design so we went ahead and started coding part of it. We also agreed that the system should be more API-friendly, so all of our methods will return true or false instead of actual values. Any values we need will be passed as parameters of the methods.

 

Week of June 16th

This week was spent working on the use cases and creating methods for each use case. I initially wanted to implement the MVC pattern but Fardad suggested against it since the system was essentially based on pulling data from the database and displaying it with little if any modification in between. The classes are, unfortunately, a complete mess right now. We’ve been having difficulties organizing the methods logically so hopefully Fardad can give us some insight soon. I’m taking Friday off to attend the RBC Next Great Innovator Coding Competition. Hopefully my team does well!

Week of June 9th

This week it was BigBlueButton’s turn to give a presentation during CDOT’s weekly presentation day. Bo and I presented on the prototype and database behind it. The biggest challenge for this presentation, and one that I dread to face for any presentation, was making the material interesting and compelling to the audience. The prototype in its current state is extremely rough around the edges. I didn’t focus on making it look appealing, instead focusing on showing the basic features of the system. For someone so obsessed with aesthetics (me) showing this beast of a website to anyone was a real pain. Poor Bo got stuck with talking about the database so he had it even worse. Luckily the presentation was seemingly well-received! I think Humph mentioned at one point that we should film the presentations to better analyze our strengths and weaknesses so I think I’ll ask if we could try doing that from now on. It’s going to be weird as hell watching myself present but I’ll gain insight that I wouldn’t otherwise have by observing my behavior.

The rest of the week was spent working on use cases. Fardad approved using the MVC pattern but suggested that before we code anything we finalize the use cases and scenarios of the system. I made a list of all the use cases I could think of and split them up among Ystallonne, Bo, and myself. Those should be finished by next Tuesday, after which we’ll start coding models and a few controllers.

Week of June 2nd

The first part of this week was spent continuing to implement some of the changes we discussed during last Thursday’s meeting. Most of the changes left have been UI fixes so they’ve been quick to do. After finishing the updates, I started working on the log-in system with Ystallonne. We coded an authentication system that uses randomly generated, cryptographically secure salts to encrypt passwords into hashes. It’s probably overkill but at least we know our data is safe. The team also had another meeting later in the week so I could show them the changes I made. We decided to set up a page for use cases on the wiki that I’ve started working on. Hopefully with this added structure, moving forward with the production prototype will be much easier.