CST499 Week 2

What project milestones did you accomplish this week? If you're working in a team, please list what you personally contributed, not the project status overall.

This week, I made big progress on my capstone project. As a brief reminder, I'm (solo project) building an online staff portal for Nyamboyo Technical School (NTS), an African nonprofit organization who strives to educate rural Kenyan youth and young adults adults modernized, technical and vocational skills.

Since I have officially completed the core deliverables for the capstone project and am currently awaiting user testing (more on that in the next section), I went ahead and began developing bonus apps that the portal can use as well as UI/UX updates to the portal. This week in specific, I completed the following:

• New application: Staff Manager. This app allows admin users to manage staff accounts, including creation and deletion of accounts and editing their details and app permissions.
• Updated the profile page to be far more modern and professional.
• Various UI/UX updates to portal, I will list them here:
•  The login page was updated to remove the arbitrary  ‘forgot password’ link.
• The login page login button was updated to include a dark/light dynamic onhover effect and to be triggered by the user pressing enter rather than having to manually click it.
• The global sidebar was updated to include light/dark dynamic onhover effects on items.
• The dashboard app cards were updated.
• Icons across the whole portal were updated to be more specific and suitable.
• The student manager and health app’s UIs were updated to be more consistent with each other and with future apps in the portal (for instance, a button that provides an Excel template file for the user to fill will always have text ‘Download Template’ and the lucide download icon

 What is your plan for next week?

Next week, I intend to begin developing a new app for the portal, though I am not 100% certain which idea I have would be most beneficial for NTS. Some ideas I have include:

• An app for admins that would allow them to "rollback" the database to an earlier state. I believe Render technically has this feature natively for paid database instances, though. Regardless, if staff can directly trigger this feature from within the app rather than dealing with Render's platform dashboard, it can be a powerful addition to the portal. 
• A messaging app, which could also lead to notifications and alerts features. For example, an admin can send a message to a teacher asking them to provide an updated list of students for a term, which could set an alert for the teacher when they log in (and potentially an email alert, too). 
• An AI-integration to the portal, for example, a chatbot that can assist Kenyan staff with technical questions. I'm excited to try implementing this at some point during our capstone timeline, although I need to iron out the details and consider ethical implications ahead of time, especially security-wise. 

In addition to beginning development of our next bonus app (pending client meeting/discussion), I will attempt to update our student manager and health apps to have more features (for instance, manual insertions/edits on the student health app records) and also be mobile responsive like the rest of the portal. At the moment, the two apps work flawlessly on desktop/laptop web browsers, but if they can work with mobile devices, too, that could be very helpful for staff who are in a pinch. 

What challenges, if any, are you currently facing in project development? Do you need instructor assistance?

Currently, I am thankfully facing no challenges and development is going smoothly. I am especially grateful for having so much support from instructors and mentors and will be certain to reach out if needed.