iChain

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  Landing

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  Topics browser

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  Topics browser - topic chosen

Inspiration

It all started when I wanted to become a UX/UI designer, Googled it and all I found was these vague recommendations like 'get an education'. Gee, thanks. Our team set out to try and solve this problem in order to give practical directions and recommendations to people that would like to learn a new skill or improve at something.

What it does

We provide the user with a vast selection of articles on topics like Web Development or Cooking or Designing (the list is pretty much limitless), which consist from a description on a particular topic and a list of external sites where the user could begin their studies.

How we built it

Basically, iChain is a single-page application written on Angular with Spring handling our backend.

Challenges we ran into

• The implementation of a Masonry-like grid (you can see an example of it on Pinterest's home page)
• Design (given our lack of experience in the field)
• One of our teammates had no previous experience with Angular (but had enough with React and that's actually me).

Accomplishments that We're proud of

• The design of our app
• Our teammate finally got to use Angular and was rather pleased with it (I was!)
• We got together and built a project MVP on a weekend

What We learned

• Task-tracking is important - we ran into some issues when one of us thought they had nothing to do while the situatuion was the opposite.
• Proper group naming in your design tool (we used Figma) is important when it comes down to handing out tasks for your team.
• We improved on our basic design skills as well as practiced in our main fields of work.

What's next for iChain

• User account functionality (adding articles to favourites, creating collections out of articles)
• User content submission functionality (creating your own content which is later approved and posted)
• Subscription services (allows users to promote their own content)
• Bringing in more content in the picture
• Migrating to SEO-enabled server-side rendering
• Improving the UX/UI part of a project (animations, responsive design, accessibility)

Built With

• angular.js
• figma
• scss
• spring
• swagger
• typescript