The Next Big Thing

It’s always been a dream of mine to create an application for the world to use. I began production of a simple application in high school. I compiled my work into an executable .jar file, but immediately found bugs in several places. I found I wasn’t ready to partake in such development and decided to scrap the project. Now, a few years later, I’m developing a new application for manoa students to benefit from and use everyday!

After learning the basics of Javascript and Meteor through the ICS 314 class offered at Manoa, I joined a group to create a study buddy finder application. Consisting of four people, including myself, we immediately created brief mockup pages for our website. After determining which features we wanted, we began production upon our project. Over the course of a month, I developed an interactive calendar. This function allows users to schedule, edit and delete events, whilst selecting to see their calendar from a day, month or list view. This can be observed here: I also revamped our application several times and decided to make use of a side nav bar, instead of the traditional horizontal menu bar at the top of the screen. This cleared up several bugs with the calendar and also opened up the option for me to display a user icon bar located at the lower left-hand corner of the screen. The final feature I incorporated into the project were profiles. After creating a database for each user, I created a small flag to be checked each time a user logged in. Thus, permitting each user to only view their own profile pictures, which is initiated to a default picture and later changed by a user supplied url, and classes they wish to receive help from and give help to.

Although this project was quite time consuming, I found myself brainstorming about it no matter what I was doing. It was always a great feeling to theorize how one change in a line of code could affect the entire application, later implement that change and observe if the result was what I expected. I never believed I could devote so much time and effort to a project, but I’m thrilled to see the result and am extremely proud with what I accomplished.

A link to the project can be found here: https://github.com/get-good/get-good.github.io