Week 4

Right, so this is week 4 of semester two. As I said in last week's entry, we have finished our MVP, and we are now adding additional features to our product, and refining existing ones. In addition, we are focusing a lot on the interface of the app. We've hired graphic designers to create renders and mock ups that we use to change the look and feel of PairFit. As such, most of my time this week has been spent in CSS editing and scouting the world wide web for plugins that can help us improve our terribly-looking UI.

At the same time, we are also working on some marketing tasks. As an example, we've already secured the name PairFit in the Google Play store. In addition, we have created a Facebook page and we are in the process of securing the app in the iOS store, just in case someone decides to register the Pairfit name before us, for whatever reason.

On a more technical side, we have added some more functionality to our product. This was the result of a change in requirements that occurred during the mid year break. According to the original plan, we are currently supposed to be refining the functionality that we completed in semester one. Instead, we have to build on adding the possibility to create fitness events, that groups of people can attend,. Originally, we, the team, planned to carry on with the original plan and tell the clients that their demands would distract us, and there is a high chance that we won't be able to meet them. After several meetings though, we went through the newly proposed plan and decided that the new requirements would potentially make the end product more valuable for the users. In addition, after doing some estimation, we realised that we have enough time to revise our backlog. As such, we collectively decided to commit to the new plan.

In summary, the team is currently split in three groups:

1. Fixing bugs and refining the UI
2. Adding new functionality
3. Focusing on marketing and research and performing other high level tasks

This week, my roles revolved around programming and designing. In particular, I started working on "events", as I mentioned above, since this is the most important piece of functionality that is left for us to complete.

Getting into more details, I has to work on both the frontend and the backend of the app. Starting from the backend, I added new tables to the database of the app, and modified our server code slightly to allow users to create very basic events. This task was relatively easy and straightforward, as I've had to do similar things in the past. I always choose my tasks in a way that I get to do a bit of everything. As such, my technical skills have stayed pretty sharp. I was able to complete everything within two days. A snapshot of the git log that contains some of the work I contributed can be seen to the left.

For the frontend side, I had to refresh my CSS skills and knowledge, and design the event cards. Even though I was given a mock up of how these cards should look like, I had to start coding from scratch. Unfortunately, a good mechanism for converting images to code does not seem to exist, so I could not use the mock ups directly. As such, it was all CSS and HTML. This task took me a while, mostly because I am not that experienced in designing things. Nevertheless, I was able to complete this task on time, but I was a bit frustrated at the end.

A really basic template of the HTML designing I did this week can be seen to the right. Unfortunately, ePortfolio does not allow CSS files. Otherwise, the end result would be prettier. Nevertheless, this is the basis of the event cards we plan to use.