Lambda Labs 8: Week 3 Recap
Getting to MVP
Part 1 - Individual Accomplishments this Week
Paste a link to your whiteboard interview. You may keep this set to private and add your PM, but you are encouraged to set it to unlisted. (Weeks 2-4)
Paste your team’s github contribution graph here and indicate your Github Handle (m4rkh0ng) :
Provide a paragraph (5-8 sentences) summarizing the work you did this week, the challenges you faced, the tools you used, and your accomplishments
This week, I distinctly recall a shift between the first half and the second half of the week. Throughout the first half of the week, I had worked on writing PDF form information to the database, working with Maribel Cuales to write PDF to file from our input form data, and reorganizing our backend to have our API routes in the same directory. Then, in the second half of the week, after it was brought to my attention that part of reaching MVP also included styling for mobile/tablet, I put a lot of my time and attention into styling our pages appropriately depending on the viewport width. I had checked our wireframe often to see what features we were missing and based my next day's work on what needed to be accomplished outside of what my teammates were covering and working on.
I felt challenged when working with jsPDF, but it was rewarding to get the PDF generated with the information that we had input on the invoice form. I had also felt challenged while styling our elements while also working with Reactstrap— for my styling strategy, I opted mostly to style at a higher specificity when necessary with vanilla CSS elements.
Tasks Pulled
List the tasks you pulled this week, and provide a link to the successfully merged PR completing that task and the trello card for that task. You must have at least one front end and one back end. The expected total is 6 with a minimum of 4.
Front End
Ticket 1: Write PDF to File from Form Data
Github: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/43
Trello: https://trello.com/c/q4TPGltc/71-write-pdf-to-file-from-form-data
Ticket 2: Styling (mostly for Navbar/Topnav)
Github: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/57
Trello: https://trello.com/c/fAL0RXC0/63-start-working-on-navbar-styling-functionality
Ticket 3: Added paid/unpaid/late visuals for invoices
Github: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/62
Trello: https://trello.com/c/a0EJ7z7m/86-changes-to-amount-paid-cause-change-to-paid-unpaid-visualition
Ticket 4: Styled Billing & InvoiceForm for mobile/tablet
Github: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/62
Trello: https://trello.com/c/FGdCrsk6/92-style-billing-and-invoiceform-for-mobile-tablet
Back End
Ticket 1: Persist PDF form information to the database
Github: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/47
Trello: https://trello.com/c/bEBXRTTh/68-persist-pdf-form-information-to-the-database
Ticket 2: Reorganized Routes into Single Directory
Github: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/48
Trello: https://trello.com/c/iNx0793X/79-consolidate-routes-from-auth0-routes
Ticket 3: Bug Fix to Reorganizing Routes (involving user endpoints)
Github: https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/51
Trello: https://trello.com/c/3ceK35x0/84-reorganizing-users-from-routes-and-api-routes-led-to-improper-route-handling
Detailed Analysis
Pick one of your tickets and provide a detailed analysis of the work you did. This should be approximately ¼ page of text, and at least three screenshots.
https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/57 https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/Labs8-AutoInvoicer/pull/62
During my work through styling our site that I had undertaken for this week, I had primarily set my focus on achieving a usable website that would act responsively when resized to different viewport widths. Most of my work when doing this involved working with my dev tools in the browser to adjust element/class styles temporarily before writing them to build changes. Repeating this process, I had been able to apply new styles for desktop, tablet, and mobile for our Invoices, Billing, and InvoiceForm components, as well as our NavBar and TopNav.
I had used http://paletton.com/ for selecting colors that I perceived as being useful for our visual design of the site layout, working with what was already given to me as an initial green color by another team member's earlier work.
Part 2 - Milestone Reflections
Put your response to the weekly question and a link to your team journal assignment here.
As a part of your journal entry, write ¼ to ½ a page reflecting on your experiences working with a team to convert a disparate set of components into a single, cohesive, and complete product. Describe the challenges you faced and the steps you took to overcome them.
Reading in the Slack channel for Labs8 throughout the week, I had seen it be mentioned that a lot of this process was a lot like putting Frankenstein together. I laughed out of empathizing with that sentiment, but also felt like brushing the sweat off of my forehead as I had seen a lot of instances where I felt that certain areas of our application weren't quite up to the expectation that they may have been required to be at.
Throughout our development week, there were multiple times when different environment variables were set, and then I had later noticed that multiple members of the team (including myself) were struggling with accessing different parts of our application after certain changes were made. I found it exciting to find and fix a lot of my own bugs, as it was enlightening to already have an understanding of the problem and work towards a solution relatively quickly afterwards.
Having my teammates readily accessible to answer questions or ask me questions, I felt like I had overcome a lot of challenges with them by discussing what kind of strategies we would like to take to address certain problems, and then execute our strategies and regroup to learn what we'd implemented and what was working well. Then, we would repeat this process as we continued to implement new features and refine what already existed.
As a group, demonstrate that you project has implemented every feature in the specification. Bugs can be present, and a rough experiences is expected:
List each major feature in your specification and provide a link to where that feature is implemented
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Generate PDF
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Track PDF
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User will start with 3 free credits
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Credits are consumed to create invoices
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Ability to purchase further credits
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Ability to pay for a subscription to get unlimited credits/generate unlimited invoices
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User receives welcome email when they sign up
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User is able to reset their password via email
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Visually shows paid vs. unpaid invoices
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Also shows late invoice
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Click invoice card to go to create/edit page for that particular invoice
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Auto-increment invoice number (this is per-user)
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Auto-fill city and state based on zip code
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Auto-fill tax based on zip code
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Changes to "Amount Paid" cause change to paid/unpaid visualization
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Landing page
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Log in / Register links
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Log out button/link
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Billing page
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Invoice List (empty, not empty) page
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Invoice Create/Edit page
(Not using settings page anymore)
