Rainbow Retail

Rainbow Retail is the final project I and my teammates submitted for a software development class in the spring 2020 semester. The prompt for the app was to create a shopping platform for the students dorming at the University of Hawaii dorms. We based the on popular sites like Craiglist or Facebooks’s Marketplace, where there’s no explicit payment system. Rather, each users would negotiate with each other for the price of an item. The app was built using React, Meteor, MongoDB, and Semantic UI. The source code is hosted on Github.

While the the choice of tools were choosen by the professor, this project was still a very good, general introduction to using the web app technology stack. React is a very versatile and easy to learn frontend tool, and it works with Semantic UI very nicely. Meteor and MongoDB is powerful, but only after I spent some time reading the documentation. The ease and simplicity of the stack allowed me to work on both the frontend and backend of the app. I was able to create the user-to-user chat system and admin reporting system, with related server code and website code, entirely from scratch. Since both front and back-end uses javascript, I was able to control the information that is published to the user.

The combination of React and Semantic UI also allowed me to quickly made very clean and animated pages. The front page was made with inspiration from sites like Apple or Indorse, Something that would take serveral days of CSS and HTML could be done in a couple of days.

This was my second project with Github, but it is the first project that utilizes an Agile-like project management. Three milestones were established, with 10 to 20 tasks created for each milestone. The process boils down to holding a meeting every three days to discuss the state of the project while we work on each task separately. There were several problems with this management style, since we weren’t experienced in the process. Some mistakes in planning and communication were made, but we were able to come together and deliver a functional product.

Through making this application, it has inspired me to learn more about creating web applications. The process and tools that we’ve learned is very close to the current industry standard, so it’s possible to use the same frameworks and tools to make the next Facebook or Ebay. After completing this project, I’ve taken one step closer towards becoming a software engineer.

Website: renigmaflea.github.io

Source: renigmaflea/renigmaflea