CST499 Week 4

This week, some great progress was made on my capstone project. As a reminder, I am (solo) building a staff portal web application for Nyamboyo Technical School (NTS), a nonprofit African organization that educates rural youth in Kenya. 

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. 

As another reminder, I am basically done with the core features in my capstone scope, but have been building bonus apps and features for the portal in recent weeks. Below is a list of milestones that were accomplished this week: 

• Designed, built, and deployed the Penpal Application, my second bonus application for the staff portal. This app will enable staff to manage their penpal program at the school (whereby each NTS student in the program is paired with at least one American student and each pair exchanges letters about once a month). 
• Began refactoring the code in the student manager app to be mobile responsive, so that staff can use it on smaller screens when quick edits can be made in a pinch. I have made good progress on this so far, and it is almost ready for deployment, but must meet with client/supervisor first to get some feedback first. 
• Began researching Render's capacity for automatic database rollbacks, so that we can hopefully plug the feature right into the staff portal frontend. This would again be quite helpful if any mistakes are ever made by staff with the database (which is definitely a nonzero chance occurrence). 

What is your plan for next week?

For this week, I had originally planned a testing phase by staff in Kenya, but it may be postponed until one of the next two weeks. The reason for this is that it will coincide far better with the testing report assignment that will apparently be released in a week or two for us capstone students. Thus, I have chosen to instead have a preliminary mini-testing phase with only my supervisor using the app naturally for several days and providing some more feedback and suggestions while we await the larger scale testing with Kenyan staff (and I will also be providing a tutorial session which will be great). 

In addition to undergoing our preliminary testing phase, I will continue making optimizations to the portal and its apps, especially finalizing the mobile responsiveness update to the student manager app and potentially at least one other app (need to consult my client first). Some more things I will work on are fixing up the GitHub repo readme for better maintainability, cleaning up some of the code across the project (for instance, I have several import statements that use long path names which can be improved with static variables), and figuring out how to plug in Render's native database rollback feature into our app, if it's possible. 

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

I am facing no real challenges at the moment, things are going very well in this project and I will be certain to reach out to instructors if I face any issues. Thanks!