The worst assignment a college student can be subjected to is a group project. Most of the time, one person shoulders all the work while the rest of the members goof. I am grateful to say that this project does not fall into that stereotype. While it is not possible for all the work to distributed completely equally, the division of work was as equal as possible. I was a part of a team, consisting of Yusuke Hatanaka, Ronnie Kauanoe, Nicholas Miyamoto-Pennywell and myself. Our objective was to create a simple, functional meteor application to help facilitate communication between students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and its RIOs (Registered Independent Organizations). In keeping with our motto of “simple is best”, we slated our project to be called My UH Club, a name inspired by the My UH site. You can find the project’s github homepage here.On the homepage, there is a link to the deployed application that is hosted by galaxy. Also on the homepage, there are various video tutorials that help both users and developers utilize the application as well as the goals for this project. The My UH Club application was constructed using Javascript, some HTML and CSS elements, React (Javascript), and Meteor(Javascript), and Mongo (for the back end database).
Even though our group worked extremely well together, we did encounter challenges involving teamwork and communication. Early in our project, we encountered a large merge conflict when attempting to incorporate a member’s work. We prayed and sacrificed a fatted calf as we manually resolved these conflicts through the command line, hoping that the merge would not break the functioning code. As you can see from the finished product, we were able to successfully overcome this obstacle. Thankfully, this challenge came early on in the project and our group managed to learn from this instance. The reason for our large merge conflict was that members weren’t pulling or fetching constantly, so we made it a point to remind each other to pull or fetch whenever we worked on an issue. During the period with the most commits and pull requests, only I would approve branches to be merged if there were any conflicts because that seemed to be the best way for the team to avoid accidentally breaking the code during a merge. However, after about 90% of the work was done, the other members were allowed to approve merge requests and manually resolve conflicts.
I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so I will use this section to brag about the awesome work my team members did. If you have not visited the application yet, I would highly encourage you to do so. Yusuke constructed our landing page, the report a problem page, as well as the functionality to those pages and design elements for the entire site. Nicholas created the role specific functionality for each user category (the different account types such as administrators, users and club organizers), the view reports page, the add/delete clubs page, the edit clubs page and all of the functionality of those pages. Last but not least, Ronnie created the search and favorites page and all the associated functionality with those pages which entailed importing a .json file of real RIOs at UH Manoa which Yusuke had found as well as the back end database configuration for tracking the favorites of each user. I was in charge of the About the Developers page as well as management of the GitHub homepage.
Even though our application is simple, what matters is that it works according to the goals we set in place and we did not end the project with feelings of hostility towards one another. That hostility shall be fostered at our post-project Monopoly party to celebrate our achievement.