Classes: Fall 2019

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Quick highlight of three web apps I developed this semester using React, Preact, and Ruby on Rails.

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Classroom • React • GitHub

Jacob, Greg, and I worked on a three-person agile team to develop a web app for managing course sections, class documents, submission grading, and user management.

Material UI components

React context providers for theming.

Entity Framework Core and Dotnet on the backend.

Grading student submissions as an instructor (updated)

Entity Framework Core was great for learning JWT Token distribution, and how to lock down endpoints to user role (Teacher, Student, ...etc)

Editing course details as an admin - made easy with material-ui table

Deals on Rails • Ruby on Rails

For Software Engineering Languages and Tools, Colton, Stephen, Olivia, Chase, and myself worked on a 5 person agile team to build a directory for local restaurant deals. It works with a voting system similar to Reddit for customers, and establishments can sign up to post their own deals.

Daily Cal

It was great to learn how to use facebook as for external sign-on and implement JS in the context of a rails app as well. The major lesson was learning to build functionality first, and style second. I've got a habit of tweaking UI and design instead of fully implementing a feature, and doing the opposite let us deliver on time.

Coverage report with testing completed using cucumber and rspec

Hosting a live prototype at the end of every 2-week sprint made deploying our final product much easier.

Real-Time Temperature Graph • Preact • GitHub

A semester goal of mine was to find an outlet for using preact and typescript, so I included them in our online-enabled thermostat for senior design. The site displays data from Firebase, populated by a Raspberry Pi with a temperature sensor. Things like the display on the Pi needed to be controlled from the frontend, so firebase was used for two way communication.

Reflecting hardware changes through firebase realtime database

We setup the Pi inside a small tupperware container with a lipstick phone charger. All client-side code was written in a multiprocess python script, and it sent text messages through Twilio. We were able to solder the sensor to a headphone jack, and use a 3.5mm port to keep the device modular.

For building out the graph, I used preact-charts. It's built on top of d3, and tinkering with the underlying d3 code made for a pretty terrible experience. Missed having the options of react components to choose from, and this single-view site wasn't a great way to benchmark preact.

Displaying measured temperatures

Looking Back and Future Goals

Would have liked to include:

Integration tests -> automated with github actions.

Working on three "agile" teams at once makes using agile difficult. Testing then either suffered or was non-existent.

Remote hosting of Entity Framework Core + SQL

Never found a simple solution.
Having more experience with docker now, I could use that to spin something up quickly.

Create a realistic benchmark of preact vs react to make more educated decisions on our upcoming CHI project.

We'll be hosting a web app to be viewed on mobile devices in a local area network inside a medical tent.