Self Critique

Phase 1

What did we do well?

We managed to learn a bunch of tools we have never used before very quickly! Most of us had no experience with AWS, Docker, Flask, React, or any of these tools. However, within the course of two weeks, we were able to get our web app up and running on an EC2 server. Also, we managed to get our front-end working with React instead of using static HTML. Though it did slow our progress at first, we're confident that we will struggle less later on as a result.

Additionally, the team collaborated really well together and everyone showed up to the meetings. We had great communication and we're all pleased with our progress so far.

What did we learn?

As stated above, we learned how to use so many new technologies within the course of two weeks.

We feel a lot more comfortable with ReactJS, Docker, and Flask, and things continue to progress more smoothly as we become more experienced with our tools.

What can we do better?

We can definitely improve our time estimates, as we underestimated how long each part of phase 1 would take, and so we ended up allocating more time to SWE than expected. Also the aesthetics of our site are quite good thus far, but still need plenty of work.

We're also loading hard-coded data into our details pages, and it will be a challenge to get our API hooked up to the site.

What puzzles us?

We are still trying to get a full grasp of how React and Flask relate to each other. A lot of the functionality Flask was supposed to provide has been provided by React: for instance, Flask can be used for routing users to different pages of our site, but we are now using React Router, which is part of React, instead.

We also know that our API needs a lot of work, and it's going to be a struggle putting everything together.