The Club for You

Overview

For our web application, my group and I used the Meteor platform for Javascript to test and run the application on our computers’ local terminals. For writing the Javascript code, we used the IntelliJ Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and imported the Meteor and Semantic UI libraries for fun coding shortcuts (ex. the Semantic UI container and grid for web page layouts). To incorporate all of our changes into one piece and share our work, we used shared GitHub repositories.

We started with basic website features (ex. landing page, contact us page, sign in page), then slowly implemented more pages and functions while also improving the user interface and visual layout appeal. First, we decided to list the clubs, then we decided to give the clubs categories to filter them by, then we decided to enable designating favorite clubs, then we decided to implement a search function, etcetera.

My proudest contributions

For my part, I implemented the Interests page, which lists the different categories of clubs in one place and enables you to filter the clubs by clicking on a category name (ex. click on the “Cultural” rectangle or card in order to bring up the cultural clubs).

I also created the “club” role (previously, there were only the “admin” and “user” roles) so that accounts that were designated as club accounts (club account: account that is owned/operated by one of the clubs represented on The Club for You) could easily view and edit their own clubs’ information.

Otherwise, for each Milestone (we had a total of three Milestones during the course of the project), I helped update the screenshots and information on The Club for You’s homepage as necessary. I also created the new GitHub project board at the beginning of each new Milestone.

What I learned

The project was as much a learning experience (and quite a journey, too) as it was a showcase of our abilities thus far. Whenever we had an idea but didn’t know how to implement it, or whenever we became stuck on a problem, we had to research new techniques and help online. Sometimes, we had to ask our Teacher’s Assistant (Thank you, Branden!) for advice, too, because a certain problem was so intricate and/or so specialized that it was difficult to look up (ex. password resetting / email sending using Meteor gave us particular trouble).

Furthermore, as we distributed tasks to each group member, we each ended up researching and writing a lot of code on our own. In other words, there were a lot of times where I would download (or, in GitHub terms, pull) the most recent version of our project from GitHub, and I would browse through my group-mates’ code files, in awe of what they had written. From the very first code file I wrote for the project, I was able to adopt new techniques that I learned from my group-mates’ work, such as more efficient syntax, or how to implement a URL fragment in a particular place.

I firmly believe we were an absolutely brilliant group. The spirit/attitude, communication, technical skills, and overall synergy that we displayed made the project proceed steadily and with beautiful results. This was a great lasting memory of my one-semester foray into the Information and Computer Sciences school (to fulfill a graduation requirement of my Engineering school major).

To learn more about The Club for You, you can visit the homepage we created for it: https://the-club-for-you.github.io/