UHMSpaceBar

What is UHMSpaceBar?

UHMSpaceBar is an online community app that is developed with the purpose to help students at UH Manoa to find the best Clubs for them to join.

Background

University of Hawaii at Manoa is the largest college in Hawaii. Therefore, it has a big community with variety social groups that we called ‘Clubs.’ Believe it or not, there are over two hundreds clubs and organizations on UHM’s campus. However, it’s very hard for students to get the information about those clubs because they don’t know where to find them. And that’s why they need UHMSpaceBar, a well designed app with friendly user-interface that makes finding clubs never easier.

How does it work?

Every student at UH Manoa has an UH account. They can use it to log in to our system using CAS login. From the main page. They can create a profile to provide basic information about themselves.

For members

If the student, who is using the app, is looking for a club to join. They can go to the search page. From there they can see all the clubs available. They can use filter (interests and/or major) to limit their search.

For admins

If the student, who is using the app, is already a leadership/owner of a club, they can register their club, so their members and other students can join. Admin can also post events, news about the clubs, so their member can catch up.

My contributions

UHMSpaceBar

In this projects, we have four team members. Each member has different specific tasks and responsibilities.

My responsibilities are:

• UI/Front-end: For the user-interface, I’m responsible for the page’s header, login/logout button, Browse and Profile pages. I need to make sure that they are responsive and friendly to impress the users once they logged in to our app.
• Coding/Back-end: For the coding, I’m responsible for the search and profile pages. To make sure all the information are displayed correctly, and to avoid confusion, I tried to make it as simple as possible and only show the users what they want to know about the clubs, so they can decide if they want to join.

What I learned:

In this project, I learned a lot of things that I think are valuable for my career.

• Templates: I learned about how to use templates which make building a big project become less complicated. By using templates, we literally divide the project into different parts, and build the project from each part separately. Thus, it’s much easier to track and debug.

• GitHub organization: GitHub is undoubtedly a very useful tool to organize a project, and it came even more handy in a group project. During this project, I learned how to work as a team using GitHub. Our group used GitHub to assign tasks, setup milestones, and backup our files. Each member can work on separate part without interfering other’s. We work on different branches ford different issues, and once the issue is solved, we can merged back to the default(master) branch. Team member can just fetch the master branch to get the latest update of our project.

• Meteor & Semantic UI: Like I mentioned in the summary, this project is developed using Meteor for the backend, and Semantic UI as the frontend development for UHMSpaceBar. I learned how to use Meteor to create database and store users’ information. Also, to retrieve the information that we stored and display it nicely using Semantic UI.

• Deployment: Last but not least, an app without deployment would be just a local app. I learned how to deploy our app using Meteor’s Galaxy. It helps to make our app become accessible to public, so everyone can see what we’ve made.

P/s: I know our application still needs a lot of improvements, it’s far from perfect, but it’s one of my first big projects, and I’m proud of it :)