DormU
What is DormU?
DormU is an web application that allows University of Hawaii at Manoa dormitory residents to easily communicate with other residents on the same floor of their building and as well as keeping touch with their resident assistant (RA). Each user customize a profile about themselves, posts their thoughts, and as well as connecting with other members of the community. This is my team’s final project using UI framework designs, CSS and HTML, React, NextJS, Prisma, Postgres, and Vercel.
The purpose of this application is to help the resident advisors build connections in the community throughout their floors and improve communication. One special feature in this application includes the availability to request and send mealshare points among other residents. With these point transactions, residents can share extra points they have to other residents who are in need.
My Contribution
I worked mostly on deploying and consistently updating our web application to Vercel and handling bugs and errors in my team members’ code. I also took part in designing and creating the contact page and helped with our project’s estimation and tracking. Since Vercel requires our Github organization a payment plan to sign up but let personal Github accounts have one repository have a free hobby plan, I took initiative into setting up and syncing our application to a live server. While constantly deploying my team’s updated version of our application, it caught many errors and bugs that we didn’t see in Visual Studio Code. It was an additional role for me to revise my team’s code and solve the problems while my teammates continue advancing forward to meet the milestone deadlines.
What I learned
I learned about project management, team communication skills, collaboration, problem solving, estimation and tracking, time management, and the fundamentals of deploying projects with Vercel. Live server management, database systems, and connection URLs concepts was a completely new unique experience for me as it gave me insight to how real world software applications work. I found out that code may work on someone else’s computer but not others even though we have the same exact files so it was a bit difficult trying to fix the code that it works on everyone’s end. I got the opportunity to combine all of my knowledge into one big project connected and functioning all together. Even though this project was not fully completed, it challenged my abilities beyond what I know, pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. I realized what skills and actions I was capable of and know what I need to work on. Time management taught me the need to constantly stay on top of things and to make use of the team meeting times for more project planning and to update and discuss with each other about what problems we come across in our code.