Challenge: State of Hawaii Executive Branch IT Portfolio & Roadmap Visualization

Team: Crewmates

Members: Jan Iverson Eligio, Joshua Hartmann, Jason Huang

Inspiration

We wanted to showcase our abilities and knowledge attained from our studies at UH Manoa in a useful application for the State of Hawai'i.

What Our Application Does

The Office of Enterprise Technology Services presented the problem of showcasing the State's Executive Branch IT Portfolio. Most of their data is sensitive and can not be viewed by the public. However, they strive for transparency. The data that is available to be showcased and viewed to the public is the what we have to work with. Our application collects and analyzes this data and present it in an application through graphs, timelines, tree visualizations, and descriptions of the overall status of the State's IT portfolio.

How We built it

For this project we opted to use React as our front-end framework. We implement Material-UI design that is also responsive. Our graphs and charts were created with the help of d3.js, a popular JavaScript library for data visualizations. We also utilized https://github.com/orgs/the-crewmates/projects/1 to manage the development cycle. The Kanban board aided us in implementing Agile software development.

Challenges We Ran Into

Being only a group of three and still having to focus on our studies as students played a factor in how much time we could invest in this application. However, we pushed through. Also, we really wanted the layout of our application to be responsive for mobile devices, just in case. Although this will be a hosted on a website, people use their phone for internet browsing and not having our application display properly on mobile would just be a no-no. Although it was challenging and from perfect, we believe we did a decent job.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud to have a smaller size group accomplish, by our standards ;), this much. We spent most of our spare time working on this project and a lot of work is still to be done! However, we can only be proud for having done the best that we could do given our constraints.

What We learned

We learned that learning new technologies is a challenge. We overshot our personal deadline for our first milestone for this project by a big margin. However, as in life, it is hard to gauge what we can accomplish.

What's next for Crewmates

We're gonna keep on coding. We want to keep refining the application and the work is never fully complete. We eventually want our application to be beautiful, insightful, and something that we can be even more proud of being a part of.