Lambda School Labs Journey
My Lambda journey started back in October 2019, it’s been a year an a couple months now and it’s about the time to get endorsed and graduate. Before coming to Lambda School, I had so experience with low level programing and a basic understanding of Algorithms and Data Structures. My interest in Web Development has rapidly developed over the last two years, through the experiences I’ve had throughout my education at Lambda School.
For the last couple weeks, I’ve been working on my Lab’s project with a team of developers and UX designers. The team includes three Web Developers “including myself” and two UX designers. We were assigned a task to create a Marketplace Web App that will allow merchants to create a business profile and sale goods or services. Shoppers will have the ability to create a profile as well, identify interest, be matched to sellers, and the ability to purchase goods or services.
Product Road Map
Before we started coding, we had to create a product roadmap that gave us the ability to plan out and breakdown of the product into small and shippable features. We started our project by coming up with user stories to help us identify all the features we need to build to serve our users. From there, we broke each of those stories into small technical tasks that would be assigned to a single Developer for implementation. For example “As a seller, I can add/edit/remove products or services from my inventory” from here we started brainstorming ideas to identify the problems we’re faced with to solve.
This screenshot is one of the Trello cards I’ve worked on during this project. It’s a very useful tool that helped me and my team to stay organized and keep track of our progress.
Storing Images! What?How?
I was super excited and nervous at the same time about finding a way to handle storing product/service images. I never done such a thing before. Time to go to my best coding friend “GOOGLE”. I started googling how to implement such a thing with a ReactJS Front End and a NodeJS Back End. I run into many solutions and I started filtering down the I see as a possible and optimal solution. I first tried storing the images files directly into the database but I run into some issues when trying to retrieve those images fro the Front End. STUCK!!! I had to ask for help, thankfully someone told me about Cloudinary! I went straight into the documentation and it was phenomenal.
npm install cloudinaryNow it’s time to configure the Cloudinary with my NodeJS Back End.
After that, it’s time to implement the POST endpoint to allow our lovely sellers to add wonderful images to their products/services.
Now it’s time to test this thing! I’m about to post a nice Nike running shoes to the marketplace and hopefully it will sell fast lol!
BOOM!! it worked!! The seller will be redirected to the home page once the posting is done successfully. In case of any errors, an error component will be rendered in the UI.
At this moment our project is not fully done, but I’m pretty happy with the progress we made in such a short amount of time. Here’s a list of all the shipped features, HomePage, ProductPage, CreateProductPage, SellerPage, WishlistPage. We used Redux to manage the state of the App and Redux-Persist to persist our state on refresh. I’d like to see more features added to this codebase in the future such as, the ability to add videos of users using the product, live chat between sellers and buyers, the ability for buyers to leave feedback for purchased items and more.
Conclusion:
During this labs, I learned a lot about myself and got some useful and constructive feedback that improved my development process. I learned that I’m better at explaining things that I thought before, also the feedback I got from my peers to ask for help sooner than struggling and wasting time on solving a problem that someone in few minutes could help you solve. This project furthered and improved my personal and communication skills by teaching me what it takes to work with a team of developers and what’s real-world project road map is like.
I got to admit it was challenging at some points but it was a fun and great learning experience. As my journey is coming to an end with Lambda School, I’m really excited to keep learning and begin my professional career as a Full Stack Web Developer.
No one’s perfect. If you’ve found any errors, want to suggest enhancements, or expand on a topic, please feel free to send me a message. I will be sure to include any enhancements or correct any issues.