Project Conclusion - Blog 12

Yesterday was the last day we met as a team in class with the professor to discuss our final project. This discussion however, was extra special because we got to present the final product of what we have been working on all semester. This past week, the final features that I was working on was an API endpoint to help with Phase 3's requirement of displaying all the counts for all the sessions in the database. To do this, the front end team could call /count to get the counts of audience members for a specific sessions, or /counts to grab all the counts that are currently in the database. I implemented /countsBySpeaker, that returned all the counts in the database, but with the sessions sorted by which speaker was presenting each session. This way, the sponsors can use our Display Counts page to see which speakers are holding their audiences, and which are not, in turn knowing who to invite back for next years conference.

Since our class 26 was divided into 2 teams of 13, we got to attend the other groups presentation earlier this week. When they showed up with a group presentation, the format of each team member going up one at a time to show what they've contributed to the project made their presentation a bit awkward, as each person had to flip through the slides to find exactly which pieces they contributed and could talk about. Us watching this happen in the audience allowed us to adapt our group presentation into individual slides, in order, so that we could go up and easily discuss our work done and transition easily between group members.

In my slides, I discussed how my coding focus on the project was devoted entirely to the back end, and others on the front end team mentioned me in their slides as to how I worked with them to help them understand how to use my API calls to retrieve the data they wanted. For Phase 1, after the architecture for the back-end was set up, I implemented the Speaker API. This allowed the user to add, update, delete, and retrieve speakers to/from the database. During Phase 1, we had a strict front end and back team, as the backend was much more intense for Phase 1 than it was for Phases 2 and 3, due to the fact that there was API calls to be made for Rooms, Speakers, Timeslots, and Sessions. For Phase 2, we only needed to implement the Count API, so I was tasked to complete this on my own. Charles pitched in to implement a specific endpoint /sessionsByTimeslot, that returned all the sessions in the database sorted by the time they were being presented. This way he could easily implement the UI for Phase 2, that allowed users to select a session from the list and add an attendance count for the beginning, middle, and end of each session. For the presentation, I noted on my slide that I single-handedly implemented the entirety of the back end for phases 2 and 3, with the exception of having Charles' help for his personal endpoint. After noting what I did, I displayed a few examples of unique bits of code that I contributed to the project, and walked through exactly how they worked and the data my methods returned, as proof to the professor that I did actually put my share of time into the project, unlike some of the others on our team.

After the individual presentations, we demonstrated our live working product to the client/professor. The software system ran perfectly and fulfilled all the requirements we were given at the beginning of the semester. Professor Krawitz was very happy and perfectly content with the work we did this semester, and was pleased to have had us as students.

Thank you (the reader) so much for reading up until the end of this blog. Since the project is over and we have done our presentation, we have nothing left to work on as a team, and therefore I won't have another blog post on this site next week. If you wanted to check out our presentation or project, I'll try to include attachments/links after this post for u to follow and see what we've worked on as a team this semester. Thanks again! Bye!