Read this entire document before writing a line of code.
- Overview: What is this project?
- Planning & Deliverables: What will we be turning in?
- Technical Requirements: What technologies will we be using?
- Further Exploration: What if we want to do more?
- Deadlines: When is it due?
- Submission: How do we turn in the project?
- Project Groups: Who are my group members and assigned instructor?
- Presentation Guidelines: What should we cover during our presentation?
For the third project, you will use your knowledge of front-end and back-end web development to produce a polished web application that can be used by friends, family, or the wider online community -- and that will benefit your portfolio.
The objective of this project is to:
- Work with a group in a shared GitHub repository.
- Plan and implement a larger scale project as part of a development team.
- Integrate topics learned and experience gained in the course so far.
- Showcase your abilities to potential employers, friends, family, and community members.
- Create a product that serves a well-researched user need
You will be working in squads of 3 or 4 for this project.
You must review the following with your instructional team BEFORE lunch on Thursday, 2/1.
- Scope: What are you planning to build? What do you reasonably think you can implement in the time period?
- User Stories: Who is your user? What features will your app have? Set up your project and user stories in Trello or in some other organized format.
- Wireframes: Sketch out what your core pages will look like and how they will work. Consider making a paper prototype to demonstrate and/or test key user interactions.
- Data Models: Draw out the models and any associations for your project in an entity relationship diagram (ERD).
- Milestones: Outline the milestones/sprints for your group.
- User Research: Include the research results from product tests in your product design.
- Delegating Tasks: What will each group member work on? Leverage everyone's strengths, and spend the majority of coding time pair programming.
- Link to Heroku hosted project, with all core technical requirements and three flexible technical requirements complete.
- Link to source code on GitHub.
- A
README.mdfile with the following:- Description: Short paragraph (2-3 sentences) "elevator pitch" describing what your project does
- Wireframes and user stories
- User research conclusions from testing with at least 3 users
- Link to Heroku hosted project
- Technologies (languages, external libraries, APIs)
- Wish List / Future Development
- Contributors (with links to their GitHub profiles)
Not sure how to get started? Before you dive into the project, you should divvy up the following roles amongst your squadmates:
- Product Manager - responsible for user story deliverables--is the user getting what they want?
- Scrum Master - responsible for unblocking and facilitating meetings--are the developers getting what they want?
- Lead Front End Dev - when group cannot come to consensus on front-end question, they win--responsible for Angular app design
- Lead Back End Dev - when group cannot come to consensus on back-end question, they win--responsible for ERDs
- Release Engineer - responsible for merging everyone’s changes into master, also usually responsible for Heroku/deployment
- UX Lead - responsible for organizing user interviews and testing, as well as wireframes and general app design
Feel free to add more to this as you need, but you should have a point person for each of these roles (some people will have two roles, but try not to give too many to one person).
Then have a look at this document, and take charge of the setup pieces for your role.
Your app should have all of the following:
- Node: Use Node and Express as the core for the back end.
- Angular: Use Angular as the framework for the front end.
- SQL: Use a SQL implementation like MySQL or PostgreSQL for your database in development and production.
- Data Models Include at least two data models with associations.
- Data Validation: Your application should validate incoming data before entering it into the database.
- Error Handling: Forms in your application should also validate data, handle incorrect inputs, and provide user feedback on the client side.
- Testing: Write at least two unit tests for every model.
- Views: Use partials/templates to follow DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) development in your views.
- Home & About Pages: Create a landing page (homepage) that clearly explains your app's value proposition and guides the user through the "get started" funnel. Create an about page that includes photos and brief bios of your team members.
- User Experience: Ensure a pleasing and logical user experience. Use a framework like Bootstrap to enhance and ease your CSS styling. Make sure user flows utilize user and competitive research.
- Responsive Design: Make sure your app looks great on a phone or tablet.
- Heroku: Deploy your app to Heroku. Ensure no app secrets are exposed. Do not commit secret keys to GitHub!
- User Login Make sure you have authentication and authorization.
Your app should have at least 3 out of the 6 following options:
- External JSON/XML APIs Integrate third-party data into your app.
- File upload Upload files with Imgur, or similar API.
- Animations Use Angular or CSS to make page animations.
- Device Hardware Use a device's camera, geolocation, etc. with your app
- Charting: Visualize your data! Possibilities include D3, Morris.js, Highcharts, Chart.js, and Google Charts.
- Wild Card Implement an outside-the-box idea (to be pitched/approved during Project Approval time)
If you want to push yourself and learn something new, optionally consider doing any of the following ideas. Please talk to an instructor beforehand.
- Job Scheduling: Set up a job-scheduler like Sidekiq, Delayed Job, or Resque to queue actions that don't need to run immediately.
- Emails: Use ActionMailer to send emails to your users.
- Text Messaging: Use Twilio to send texts to your users (note: not free).
- Payment: Use Stripe to allow your users to purchase from or donate to your site.
- Material Design: Research the material design paradigm and apply it to ground your app's UI in the physical realm.
- Accessibility: Research web accessibility (e.g. for blind users), and apply accessibility principles to your app.
- Sessions: Use sessions to store data for site visitors (who aren't necessarily logged in).
- Search: Build a form that allows users to search your data, based on attributes. Consider looking into Elasticsearch to speed up queries.
- Whatever else you can think of!
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Monday, January 22nd - Project pitches. You must be prepared to talk about the problem you are planning on solving, the proposed value added to your user, and what you can do better than your competition.
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Wednesday, February 7th - Completed project deliverables due and presentations!
- As you make code changes, frequently commit and push to GitHub. Submit the assignment (GitHub link) on Schoology on presentation day.
- Brian
- Jason
- Mark
- Chad
- Josh
- Aaron
- Ricky
- Matt
- Will
- RJ
- Patrick
- Laura
- Kevin
- Sassan
- Milad
- Stevano
- Jin
- Remy
Each group will present their project on Wednesday, February 7th starting at 11:00am. Please follow these guidelines:
- Your presentation should include the motivation for building this project and a demo of the core functionality.
- Your presentation should also include the results of your user research, and how that drove your development.
- Maximum 15 minutes.
- Minimum 5 visual aids. Visual aids should include:
- Wireframes
- User stories
- ERDs
- Walk through the development of one feature from ideation to execution. At minimum, this should include wireframes, code samples, and the final result.
- ALL group members must speak during the presentation. Each group member should answer the following:
- What parts of the project did you work on?
- What was the most challenging aspect? Was there anything that was surprisingly easy to implement?
- What did you learn?