Self Critique

Phase 2

What did we do well?

We managed our time much better during this phase compared to the last. We were able to get the content of our website working before the end of Spring Break. Starting on things early definitely made us feel much better this time around.

In addition, we also picked up a bunch of new technologies quickly just like in the last phase. Most of us were unfamiliar with testing frameworks such as Selenium and Mocha, but we were able to get them up and running.

What did we learn?

Just like in the last phase, we learned how to use so many new technologies in a short time frame and now feel more comfortable with these new technologies.

A huge thing that we learned during this phase is how to get our React app to interact with our API that was simply running on localhost. It took us a while to figure out, but we ended up running two Docker containers simultaneously on different ports, one for the front-end and one for the back-end.

What can we do better?

We can definitely improve the UI of our website. During this phase, we mainly focused on making our website use data from our API, but we plan on cleaning up the UI some more in the future. We will need to do some styling and add some code to make the site responsive to different device screen sizes.

What puzzles us?

Our front-end people are still trying to figure out how to override the default styling that Reactstrap components come with. After talking with other groups during class today however, we may have found an answer.

We're also trying to figure out the best way to store certain pieces of data in our database so that for the next phase when we need to let a user search something, we can efficiently query the necessary data.