Team frAgilespresentBenchIt
BenchIt Demo Video | Northcoders Project Presentations
Bench the loneliness
BenchIt's mission is to combat loneliness by connecting individuals in their local community through the shared experience of sitting on a bench. BenchIt is an app for booking and managing bench sessions to meet new people or old friends. With the ability to upload local benches and share the worlds love for benches.
The Team
Tom Legg
Valentin Bizgan
Hasan
Mukesh Thapa
Ibrahim Yusuf
Technologies
React Native: A popular open-source framework for building cross-platform mobile applications using React. Firebase: A cloud-based platform for building and hosting web and mobile applications. The app uses Firebase for authentication, database management, and file storage. Expo: A free, open-source toolchain for building and publishing React Native apps, providing a streamlined development experience and access to a large collection of native APIs and components. Axios: A Promise-based HTTP client for making API requests, which was used to fetch data from the Firebase database. React: A JavaScript library for building user interfaces, which was used for building the UI components of the app. - Emulators: Virtual devices used for testing and debugging the app during development. The team used emulators to simulate different devices and platforms, ensuring the app works as expected on a wide range of devices. - Cypress: A JavaScript end-to-end testing framework, which was used to test the app's functionality and catch bugs before release.
We chose react native because it can be used on android and iPhone. We can transfer some of the learnings from react which was part of the course. It seemed to have a lot of community support and content too which we thought would be useful when using the technology. We chose Firebase because of the community support, lots of developers choose and recommend it with a lot of support available online. Works well on a range of mobile applications too! We chose Expo because we wanted to rapidly generate an application within the given time frame and expo fitted our criteria in terms of time it takes to build an app, it's intuitive, lots of support online, well maintained and works on ios and android. Lots of components which can assist in building the application.
Challenges Faced
Task allocation: Balancing tasks and making sure everyone has enough work to do can be a challenge. Dependencies: ensuring no dependencies from front end to help back end move forward and test that apis and general data movement works Time management: Balancing individual and team deadlines to ensure the project is completed on time. Version control: Maintaining version control of the codebase and ensuring everyone is using the latest version can be difficult. Using SaaS such as GitKraken was useful. Integration of different code: Merging different team members' code into a cohesive product was challenging. Staying motivated: Maintaining team morale and motivation can be difficult over the course of an intense project. New technologies: Working on new technologies and integrating them into the other technologies we were working on were a challenge. Some things were not compatible, or if they were, didn't work as intended.