Team Syntax SugarpresentPlan Perfect
Holiday Makers Dream App
Plan perfect is an app that essentially makes planning trips away an ease for a user. It allows a user to create separate itineraries for when they go to another place in the world. They can add their own activites in each itinerary, update them, delete them and see them organised on their profile calendar. One of our members came up with the idea through her love for travel, which we all mutually agreed on! The user experience is sleek, smooth and easy to navigate, with minimal clutter on the screen for easy comprehension when using it.
The Team
Fred Reed
Ben McCarrick
Yevheniia Hutorova
Nathan Briers
Ragini Sampath Kumar
Soumaya Clotaire
Technologies
We used: Firebase/React-Native
FireBase: We chose to use Firebase because it is a document based database that extracts away the difficulties that come with creating your own back-end API from scratch. Firebase syncs our data, allowing for expressive queries that scale with the size of the result set. The built-in user authentication section aids greatly with user sign up/log in, which was one of our many areas of concern we discovered during our spiking phase. Firebase also has features such as a server-less environment, App monitoring and it supports the entire scope of development from building to deployment which means more focus could be spent on front-end.
React-Native: We chose to work with React Native because it was fairly similar to code that we have known previously, but new enough that it provided us with enough challenge to get a full understanding of it. We had visions of creating a mobile first app and with this thought, it seemed like a no brainer to use React-Native, with it being one of the most popular mobile centric framworks.
Challenges Faced
One of our biggest challenges was optimistic rendering. Using Firebase meant that when we first tried to add a useState to the dependency array in our useEffects, it caused our reads for the day, which were limited to 50 000, to be used up. We solved this once the reads refreshed by running each pairs code one by one and watching the database reads to locate the issue in the code. Once we found the issue, we were able to solve the problem and continuously kept an eye on the firebase reads.
Another challenge was getting used to working entirely independently, using new stack. The first few days pushed us and we were able to push through and complete our map, using documentation and research when stuck on new problems.