Phase 4 Dialogue Reflection#
Though phase IV was a lot of work, compared to phase III it was even more rewarding seeing all of my group and my efforts come together for a finished product. After our phase III submission, we received extensive feedback from our meeting with Dr. Fontenot and Dr. Gerber. There were many issues outlined and I helped encourage the group to start using GitHub issues to track them. During this phase, I added user email, name, and match consent so that on the match page NGOs could see the user they were connecting with instead of just the ID. I also implemented a match consent feature so users can choose if they want to match with NGOs. Previously, survey history was not functioning properly since the survey would just alter the previous one. I changed the user survey to use a put request and made the survey history functional. Email and URL validation for NGOs was another quality-of-life improvement I made to the application. Regarding pages, I added the user tag add/delete feature to a new user settings page where I moved the country and bio. I also created the enterprise emissions tool and tag functionality for them. On the ML side of things, I wrote some routes for the text similarity model. Finally, I updated visuals for various parts of the website such as changing icons, making matches dropdowns, and more. Mainly, a lot of this phase was fine-tuning and making the application more user-friendly.
Overall, I am extremely happy with the end product of Carbon Connect. I think we worked very well as a group. I would say that I focused on the API routes as I was the first to figure out how to write them and communicate with the database. I helped the other group members figure out how to first write get requests and then write post, put, and delete routes. In general, I helped with many bug fixes, front-end elements, back-end elements, and ideation.
The part of the project I found most challenging was just the ever-changing elements of it. With the limited time frame, it felt like one day we were doing this persona, and the next day we changed it entirely. It was hard to keep up as it seemed like progress we made was just thrown away. To be honest, it was very frustrating as I hate “wasting” time. However, this was also a great learning experience with knowing how to adapt and change thinking.
I enjoyed the little things about this project mostly stemming from interacting with my group. Whether we found a stupid little bug together or wrote very stupid code I loved laughing and talking with my group. With this project, I learned proper GitHub workflow and how to work better on a coding group project. Therefore my favorite part of the project was navigating working as a group and being dedicated to a collective goal.
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