Project: RateMyDIY
Date: December 14, 2018

Individual Accomplishments

This week I worked on polishing the website so that it looks more like a professional website. This involved making changes to the UX of some pages that we had not updated and having a more uniform styling throughout the website. I also worked on the sorting functionality in the search results page. It is a very different process to work on adding new functionality once the majority of the project is done as I have to figure out how to get it working with what is already there. Some functionalities that we designed can definitely be improved and the mindset changes from getting it to work and done to is this the best way to accomplish this. I started to see some flaws in what we developed as we were polishing it. Getting it to a point where it is working is one thing but having the website be robust and easy to update is a different challenge that I had not experienced before.

Detailed Analysis

My focus this week on making small changes so that the website looked clean and worked as expected. I did not work on any major feature as we decided that we should make sure that what was already developed would work properly. This was more of a challenge than I expected because some of the features that we developed had bugs that were caused by the way the featured was developed. It would take more effort than expected to get it to working like a finished product. For example, the search tags that we added to the home page were intended so that a user can click on one of those and view projects in that category. However, the way I developed those was that it would leverage the existing search functionality and will return projects that match that search term. Because of this, it was not possible to update the search tags so that it only returned projects within that category. We had to either re-work how a feature worked or adapt what was built so that it matches our requirements.

Tasks Pulled

Sort Projects
Trello: https://trello.com/c/p2STtfXs/210-search-page-sorting-projects
GitHub: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-RateMyDIY/pull/133

Search Page styling
Trello: https://trello.com/c/iGtErkfj/202-search-page-styling
GitHub: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-RateMyDIY/pull/128

Header Component re-work
Trello: https://trello.com/c/sxnUEvLw/197-header-search-is-borked
GitHub: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-RateMyDIY/pull/117

Fixed Header, Search term
Trello: https://trello.com/c/qTV8VwJT/212-fixing-bugs
GitHub: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-RateMyDIY/pull/128

Milestones Reflections

The main goal this week to make the website look like a polished, professional project. This turned out to be much more difficult than I thought it would be. I had heard about the 90/90 rule that says that getting the project to 90% done takes 90% percent of the effort but that getting the remaining 10% done takes another 90% of the effort. We experienced this rule because some of the features we developed are working but making it work perfectly will take much more effort. We found a ton of things like this were the design choices we made while working on building the feature determined how difficult it would be to make changes in the future. I’m a bit nervous for the next sprint in which we will be asked to make a change order for our project. I think it’s a great experience to look at the design decisions of a feature with a different objective in mind than just getting it to work. The other part of getting a polished project was more fun. It involved making UX changes and achieving a more uniform design throughout the website. We defined a look and feel last week and so we needed to make changes this week so that the entire website followed this.

Here is the link: https://ratemydiy.netlify.com