Week 7

Week 7, last week before the break. People were still sick, so we didn't have a meeting this week either. As such, we continued working on our tasks. Fortunately, some of the team members had a lot of free time (due to their sickness), and were able to contribute a lot to the project.

A lot of interesting things happened this week. For starters, we took part in ANU open day, so I guess I'll start by talking about how this went.

So, we were assigned a stall inside the Ian Ross building, along with other teams/groups/societies. Me, Andrew and AJ were the team members that attended. Unfortunately, Monday could not make it. We met around 11AM and started setting up our stall. We had a monitor showcasing our project, and another computer that people could use to sign up to our mailing list. An image of the set up can be seen to the right. I'm on the right, Andrew is on the middle, and AJ is on the left.

The event went really well. We met a let of current and future ANU students, interested parents, ANU alumni, and so on. It was a good chance to practice or pitching skills and public speaking. We did help people learn about the project, and by extension, the TechLauncher initiative. The main benefit from our participation in this event, though, was that we were able to capture the interest of others, and expand our mailing list. This will be helpful for attracting people for our beta release, which will take place shortly before we go live, officially. Overall, open day was a huge success, and we did manage to benefit as a team, and on a personal level as well.

In other news, when it comes to development, we recently discovered that some bugs that we thought we fixed have resurfaced again. As such, we have given up adding features for a while, and we are focused on fixing these bugs. This was expected to happen sooner or later; however, most of these bugs are not critical. If I had to describe them, I would use the term "annoyances". But, we have to take care of them eventually, so why not get this over with as soon as possible?

After this week, we'll work full time on the project, to iron out the rest of the issues and finalise some mini features we want to add.

Apart from my contribution in Open day (which consisted of setting up the questionnaire, buying candies to lure people to our stall, talking to strangers about the project and so on), I also worked on coding. In addition, I continued worked on the group presentation material for this Friday.

As far as development goes, I had to do the usual bugfixing tasks. As an example, I had to fix some graphical elements that were out of position (mostly text), redo some tabs in our application that didn't render correctly on iPhones, and reformat the code and add comments to it. These issues were related to the frontend. Our backend is very solid, we haven't had a server crash in well over a month, which in a sense, simplifies things.

After going through this process, I started working on some things that should be essential for a social networking application, but haven't yet been implemented. One of these was the ability to delete accounts. This task was not hard at all, as it only consisted of sending a delete request to the database and then logging the user out of the app. I had to code the delete request myself, but the logout() method was already there.

Another feature I added was a feedback form, that users can complete and submit. If we want to know what the users think, this is the way to go. This task was a bit more complicated, as I had to write code that saves the feedback text to the database, and also do some GUI work. As usual, I had some issues with CSS, but nothing too bad.

Most of these additions can be seen in the image gallery to the right. Some other things additions I've included are visual indicators to highlighted images, and making buttons transparent to reduce eye stress.

Moving away from dev work, I also spent my time on the presentation we have on Friday. I used last week's template to complete my part of the slides, and also organised a Skype session so that we can practice as a team, and see if the whole thing makes sense, or if there are parts of it that we need to revise. I was also responsible for finalising the slides, and submitting them online. I feel like I contributed the most to preparing for it, and I think that the team recognised this and made me have a smaller role in the actual presentation. In any case, my work helped us be prepared in time.