GitHub Web app

(The Code Carrots 2.0 workshop had a format of 7 weekly meetings, each lasting 2-3 hours, concluding with a project demonstration day.)

Member of the workshop's Route Finder team (3 participants, 2 mentors) that created Route Finder—a web app that allows someone on a road trip to find points of interest along their driving route.

Summary of contributions:

• The whole workshop brainstormed various project ideas and selected a handful of ideas to form teams around. After joining the Route Finder team established by my teammate, we discussed and sketched the initial road trip traveler use case.
• Working with our mentors, we researched the Google Maps API documentation to learn about our functionality options. All team members had little to no JavaScript experience, so we also worked on the JavaScript tutorial that our mentors recommended for learning the bare necessities.
• We backtracked after realizing the volume limitations of the free API license, combined with our chosen API functionality, created very subpar web app performance. Further research and re-implementation of a better suited functionality corrected many (but not all) of our performance issues.
• Our group met out of workshop time to work on our presentation content and slides. My portion of our Demo Day talk focused on our challenges with the API functionality and its free license query restrictions, as well as our takeaways about debugging using browser developer tool breakpoints.
• This was a great experience in working with another entity's existing codebase--a valuable skill for the future!