Connecting Lambda School Alumni
During our final four weeks as Lambda Students we are tasked with creating or contributing to a project with other Lambda students. For our project, we got to work on the Lambda Alumni Network, a private community for Lambda students to connect with their peers, advance their careers, and give back. I really enjoyed working on this project because we had the advantage of really seeing the user stories, or what users would expect from the site, as first hand users ourselves.
We started the first week by going over the product roadmap, meeting with our stakeholder to find out what his vision of the product was, and then we got straight to work as a team coming up with user stories and fleshing out our tasks in Trello. The first thing that we noticed was that the previous team had begin work on completely revamping the UI, and we felt this was where we should put our focus from the start before diving too deep into any new features.
One of my teammates and I both volunteered to act as design leads, which gave us the opportunity to attend a few extra UI lessons and receive one on one feedback from our Design Manager. One of the things that he suggested we did was to create a wireframe and share with him to get his feedback. My teammate and I looked at what we thought needed the most work and decided that since the user profile section was one of the things that we would both be overhauling and adding features to, we would start there. Together in Whimsical we spent a couple of hours going over the current design and features and determining the best approach with the features we wanted to add.
Digging into the code
Once we figured out what we wanted the profile section to look like, it was time to dig into the code. We met as a team to decide who wanted to work on which section and then we got to work. Along with making a few styling changes, the main part of the profile section that I decided to work on was adding a section to the profile setting for a user to update their Bio, which would be displayed at the top of the profile as a blurb underneath their name.
To do this I first created the request in the store, and set up global state.
Then, using Ant Design’s built in card component, I created a card for the bio update in the profile settings component, and added to the profile content section.
Minor Challenges
Thankfully here because the last team had already implemented Card and Button components with Ant Design, it wasn’t too hard figuring out how to use them. Coming from a Material UI background, Ant Design actually seemed a little bit intimidating when I was reading through the docs, at first! The one small challenge that we had with this section was that it was not deploying to Heroku. After doing a little digging on Node errors, I went into the backend and deleted the package-lock and Node Modules, ran a new npm install, migrated and seeded the database again and managed to get it to deploy.
Closer to Connecting Alumni
Despite it being a very hectic month with lots of meetings, guided projects and lessons, and a bit of pair programming, we managed to put together a pretty impressive product that we will now be able to use ourselves as “almost Alumni!”
During this past 4 weeks our team:
- Completely revamped the existing UI
- Added functionality and a couple of new sections, such as updating the user bio, deciding whether or not they want to mentor/mentee, and connecting their GitHub accounts to the User Profile.
- Added a Following feature
- Displayed a User’s posts and comments on the User Profile
- Expanded on the flagging feature
- Created a Bug Reporting System
- Created private rooms that Administrators can add users to
- Added the ability to favorite rooms
- Added search capabilities
- Created a messaging system
And more I am sure I’m forgetting! Aside from what we put out, we really worked together to stay on top of tasks in Trello, pair program and bugfix, and learned together. I really couldn’t have asked for a better team and it was such a great, real-world experience working on a team with some really awesome developers!
The Future of LAN
Some things that I would love to see in future releases are:
- A more concise messaging and message notification system
- The ability to pull some profile information from LinkedIn (ie: location)
- The ability to share to LinkedIn
- True GitHub integration so that User’s can see what others are working on, as well as collaborate on projects
That being said, our Project Manager and Stakeholder were so impressed with what we accomplished that they decided to go ahead and hand the Lambda Alumni Network over to Alumni to open source! I think this is such an awesome opportunity for fellow alumni and I am excited to both continue to work on this project and to see the direction that others would like it to go. My time at Lambda has been so amazing, and I am excited to continue and share my next journey with my fellow alumni!