At first I need to apologize for the missing blogs for week 8, 9, 10 and 11. During those weeks we were busy with the development of the website and I forgot about the routine. Finally this week, we finished all the development and the website is launched. Then I continue with my previous blogs and reflect what I have been done for the whole month of October.
Firstly, I realized the importance of front end framework. As I mentioned before, I have never be exposed to a front end framework before and for assignment one and two, I just followed my seniors and experienced teammate, trying to make use of AngularJS and VueJS. However, it was not until I was asked to work on the old front end code, which was written without a framework did I realize how important the frame work is. When I was reading the old code, it was all messed up and just like a piece of sh*t. CSS was written in Html, Html was written in Javascript for rendering new elements, Javascript was written in Html for logic control. I totally had no idea about where to start. In addition, without double-binding, I was not able to update data lively. I needed to use JavaScript to hard code the “live data updating”, which was painful and hard to maintain. Despite of this, I cannot setup a new environment and write the front end code from scratch because of the time constrain. The pain lasted for a whole week. I was almost dying after I finished all the redesign of the front end. But thanks for the painful experience, I am now possibly able to read code more efficiently. More importantly, I become more careful about my coding style in development.
Secondly, “sometimes coding is the easiest thing, because you always know what to do”. I was told by a alumnus from CS3216 about this, which was really true. Coding is much easier. For instance, you need this feature, then you add database tables for it, you create routes for it, you generate APIs for it and you design user interfaces for it. However, when doing marketing, the world does not work like a machine. You tell everyone that your product is good and therefore they should use it. It does not work. You need to know what are the things your customers what. Sometimes a product for charity does not have the magic to attract users as a simple yet cute game. When I tell my idea to my friends, they may think: hmmm, that’s interesting, I will help you to register an account. However, they will never really use it or even recommend it to their friends. We spent a lot of time thinking about our marketing strategy and found it really hard. I think I really need to go out to ask people and tell them about our stories in order to gain more users. Hope that I would be more experienced about finding the customers’ interests after it.
To be honest, I have never been such painful as these days before. At the beginning of October, after a whole week of developing website day and night, I thought I would be able to have a rest. How silly was I at that time! Endless user feedback and minor bug overwhelmed me in the following weeks. At the same time, I needed to design posters, write promotions, recommend out website to friends… But the truth was, I was enjoying the whole process. I overcame the problems and I am still alive at the end of the semester. I could feel my growth and I really think the pain is good. The last week we need to more promotion and I hope that our registered user will hit our expectation! Good luck!