Category: Nathan Ang’s Status Reports

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I finished up all the functionality of the backend, ironing out any bugs that came up during further testing. This included fixing the response codes from 201 to 200 which is more general. The backend is now very robust and extendable.

For the frontend, I finished all the requirements, such as compartmentalized region viewing. Now, viewers can see which seats are open in a subsection of the space:

I conducted a study on latency on the API calls as well as rendering for the final presentation.  I ran scripts to call the functions

create_hub: 150.2 ms
create_seats: 72.3 ms
delete_hub: 57.0 ms
delete_seats: 82.0 ms
update_seats: 68.2 ms
get_all_free_seats: 123.8 ms
Generalized worst case: 400 ms

Rendering average case: 100 ms, worst case: 200 ms

All these times meet our requirements which is great!

I then spent the rest of the time preparing for the final presentation which went really well.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward. All parts are  is working well, so now I just have to do final extra touch ups on the frontend, such as making it look prettier.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This week, my task it to add final extra touch ups on the frontend,. Specifically, I will add the particles library to the background of the page to give it a more lively, tech feel. I will also be working on the video we must do. I can’t wait! 🙂

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I worked with JJ to fully integrate the data hub and the public API endpoint of our backend. now, it is working!

Then, I made 15% more progress on the frontend of the project. My idea is to make it very simplistic and easy on the eyes for clients. I restructured the React code to convert from class-based to functional-based code. This is more of an updated coding style with modern react, and it will be extremely helpful due to some of the new frontend requirements (map interface).

Specifically, I now structure components asfunction myComponent() { ... } rather than class myComponent extends React.Component { ... }

This style of coding React has reported to have massive performance improvement and allows for clean, stateless components.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward. Integration is working well, so I just have to finish the frontend component by the final presentation. I will be working hard in the weeks to come.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This week, my task it to complete on the web application frontend. Specifically, I need to implement a map feature that shows clients areas of free seats and quantity of free seats. I can’t wait! 😁

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I worked with JJ to connect the data hub and the public API endpoint of our backend. I also made the post requests of create_hub, create_seats, update_seats, delete_hub, delete_seats, get_free_seats more robust.

Specifically, I fixed a bug when a hub is instantiated without seats. This would make the filtering of seats have an index out of bounds error.  Thus, I fixed this by adding a check for the edge case of empty hubs.

Then, I made 15% more progress on the frontend of the project. My idea is to make it very simplistic and easy on the eyes for clients. The demo showcasing all of this went very well.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward, after our demo. 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.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This week, my task it to work on the web application frontend. Specifically, 15% this week would keep me on track with respect to the schedule. I can also help JJ and Will on their parts, which currently pose more of a risk, as the software stack basic functionality is stable. I can’t wait! 😁

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I finished the deployment of the backend server. Now, the backend server is able to handle post requests of create_hub, create_seats, update_seats, delete_hub, delete_seats and the important get request of get_free_seats from the public endpoint of:

https://freeseats-a3.herokuapp.com/

I used Heroku, due to low-costs (free), and focus on deployment of an MVP. However, Heroku has capabilities to handle large load, which will be important if we wanted to scale our project.

This is for use of the data hub component. For integration, I wrote a quick API docs for use of the backend API: https://github.com/FreeSeats-Team/freeseats/blob/web-deploy/web_app/README.md

I made a frontend that is a basic skeleton to simply display data in a list form with elements:

Data_Hub_ID: #_of_free_seats

This will be extended upon to include location and aesthetics.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward, for our demo. 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.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This week, my task it to work on the web application frontend and polish out the backend if issues arise. For the demo, I hope to have MVP functionality of the frontend with backend integration with the hardware components. After the demo, I will polish out the frontend’s aesthetics and add more robust database entries (with locations, etc.). I can’t wait! 😁

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!

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I worked on bootstrapping the cloud storage (MongoDB) and setting up the skeleton framework of the software stack. It is still a work in progress.

I also helped edit the slides for the our Design Review Presentation, which was a big focus for our group in the beginning of the week.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward. I expect the implementation part to have a lot more roadblocks, so I will be working hard in the weeks to come. I also expect shipping of necessary to take a while, so we will order parts soon (by Monday)

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This week, my task it to continue working on the cloud storage and setting up the skeleton framework of the software stack. I will also help the team order necessary components!

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week, I completed research on a good software stack for our use case. I researched different types of popular web software stacks, but ultimately chose MERN due to its smooth learning curve and reported focus on efficiently creating an MVP, which is exactly what we need.

I also completed my slides for the upcoming Design Review Presentation, which was a big focus for our group this week.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with my parts and feel confident moving forward. I expect the implementation part to have a lot more roadblocks, so I will be working hard in the weeks to come.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This week, my task is to bootstrap the cloud storage (MongoDB) to be used. If done correctly, I can have an endpoint that the data hub can communicate to our cloud database via.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I focused on the project proposal presentation. I refined the slides and put in time and effort in preparation. The presentation went well, and the rest of class time was devoting to listening to other teams’ presentations.

I also switched responsibilities to the software stack. I researched the pro’s and cons to different software stacks such as MERN  and MEAN, as well as various hosting services.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

I am on schedule with the research and feel confident moving forward. Research will be wrapped up soon and I will start implementation soon!

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to wrap up the research with plenty of reasoning, and sync up with the rest of the team if they need any assistance.

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

This week I focused on researching of potential technologies for our project. Specifically, I looked into sensors to detect occupancy. I took a look into varying sensors (IR, Computer Vision, Pressure), and I started looked online for purchase options.

Also, I took up the task of dividing up work for the Project Proposal presentation and helped hash out a coherent schedule for the project. What stood out to me was how little time we had to realistically produce an amazing project, so I am now in grind mode.

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

It is very early in the project and we just made the schedule, but we seem to currently be on schedule.  I have no doubts that conflicts will arise as we work on the project, but I looking forward to solving issues in our project together!

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

This coming week, my task is to research the occupancy sensor side of the project. I will finalize a purchase on parts needed on this hardware side with plenty of reasoning. I can’t wait for the weeks to come!