What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
This week, I worked on the ethics portion of Capstone, and reflected a lot on some of the ethical problems that came with our project with the group. These include:
-Someone viewing FreeSeats to steal things when people aren’t there
-Finding a single person in the library alone as a target for theft or violence.
-Exclusionary to people in wheelchairs
I will continue to keep these ethical problems in mind throughout the implementation and create guards in software to remedy them (ie. range of available chairs instead of specific values).
This week, I continued to work on the web application. I continued to bootstrap the cloud storage, MongoDB, which I chose due to accessibility and ease of use within a JavaScript stack. I setup MongoDB Atlas, to store all of our data in the cloud. This was chosen based on my research of cloud storages with the idea of a scalable MVP as a priority.
My basic database schema is as follows:
I decided to follow a one-to-many hierarchy to match the nature of a study space having multiple chairs. Each seat has a boolean of occupied or not. I implemented this schema to contain the minimal amount of information needed for functionality, as that makes it simpler for our MVP stage.
I also implemented the server skeleton and client skeleton that are able to interface with each other. This is using Express.js, Node.js, and React,js, which is part of the MERN stack. For the server, it supports CRUD operations, as this is the functional minimum of a database server. The client can then interface freely with the MongoDB Atlas cloud database during the development phase.
Is your progress on schedule or behind?
I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward. I expect that as we move further into the implementation part, we will have a lot more roadblocks, so I will be working hard in the weeks to come. We are gradually receiving our ordered products, and so far they all seem to be on schedule!
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
This week, my task it to continue working on the web application. I have to make 25% more progress on the server-side, and get a public endpoint up and running so that the data hubs can act as the clients interfacing with the server. I can’t wait!