Projects
Collaboration revolving around Git, Agile, and pair programming is the common thread between the following four projects.
This enabled the team — all eight of us — to gain experience in a setting that mimics real-world software development as much as possible.
More below on what I did and learned:
Music Player API
I worked in sub-teams to implement two API endpoints and practiced debugging by isolating and reproducing bugs. Most importantly, I took ownership of the quality of the app regardless of whether this is a "backend project" or "frontend project".
Takeaways
My approach towards quality has been consistent throughout the 16-week course at iO Academy, but it was especially gratifying to see the results manifest the way they did in this project. Working on this project has also given me confidence in troubleshooting and debugging. In particular, I learned to hone in after having identified a bug's origin.
Keywords:
PHP, React, JavaScript, MySQL, debugging
Applicant Portal
This was my first project working with a legacy codebase. As if this was not challenging enough, I and two of my peers took on implementing a new feature that, to our surprise, required us to work across the entire stack and introduce a new dependency to the codebase: PHPMailer.
This new feature improved system security and user support by enabling the app to send automatic emails to Academy admins whenever applicants edit their applications.
Takeaways
Having examined this codebase and implemented new functionality into it, I gained confidence in reading and working with code that interweaved between the frontend (JavaScript) and backend (PHP and MySQL). I also gained appreciation for the work behind website/app functionality that I had previously taken for granted.
Keywords:
JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Object-oriented Programming, Slim, legacy codebase, documentation