7. Self Critique - adle29/cs373-idb GitHub Wiki

What did we do well?

From the website’s perspective UI and UX is very important to us as developers and that is something we believe we executed very well. Our website is very simple and easy to navigate. Speed is a very key component to great UX and clicking through pages is very speedy. Our search is deep and responsive. From our API’s perspective speed and consistency is of the highest priority. Both of those we have nailed. Thankfully due to the speed of our Droplet on Digital Ocean our API is incredibly responsive. Our API’s responses are very consistent as well which is very important to outside developers using our API.

What did we learn?

We each individually learned a lot about different software tools. Clark learned out to use SQLAlchemy to create models, Abraham learned how to setup a web app with Flask, Caleb learned how to setup a database on digital ocean, Jason learned how to use postgres and scrape an API and Hassan learned how to write a wiki. Overall most importantly we all learned how to work in a team. And this was not easy to say the least. We dealt with conflicting schedules, different levels of experience, different communication skills, and ultimately bringing five different coding egos together to great one badass web app. Thankfully to the power of slack and github we accomplished bringing all of us together to accomplish this task.

What can we do better?

We definitely could have worked together better has a group when it comes to our timing. We all got along and ultimately knocked out each phase but it wasn’t without some stress. We left every phase to the last minute to turn in the project, including this third and final phase. The source of most of our problems was the way we setup our Droplet on Digital Ocean. Somehow in the process of setting postgres and SQLAlchemy our user permissions got messed up. We had to be the “root” user to right to any files, yet only the postgres user had access to the database. A bit of finagling had to be done but we did get it figured out just not in the ideal way.

What puzzles us?

We really would like to know why we had these issues in Digital Ocean. When searching around we discovered a post saying that depending on the order in which you install the tools on Digital Ocean all the permissions can get messed up. This is incredibly puzzling and wasted a good portion of our time to solve.