MeneDevs

Accessing our App

To access our app, go to https://mene-devs.herokuapp.com/. For login info please message @Jack Hunziker on slack.

Inspiration

While our front end was influenced by the general design of Hawaii.gov websites, the inspiration for its function was that the TOD had an inefficient way of manually gathering data and inputting it into excel sheets. From that, the direction we wanted to take the project was in a way that provided a solution for the TOD to accurately and efficiently gather data and automatically input it into excel sheets. All while keeping it as intuitive as a Hawaii.gov website so that anyone could use it.

What it does

Our website allows the TOD program staff to gather necessary information from agencies and request more information through the creation of supplementary questions. By allowing the opportunity to pre-define questions and question types, we also achieved a way to more accurately sort the information received and format it into a downloadable Excel Sheet. Through our website, we also hold the information in an unambiguous data table where project reports are easily accessible and visible to their corresponding agencies.

How we built it

The app was made with express.js and amazon-dynamodb. Express.js was used to run the server which is hosted on Heroku and dynamo is the database we used to store information such as user accounts, submitted reports, and editable report form questions.

Challenges we ran into

Although we had many challenges during the development of our project, all of it was attributed to one thing: the inexperience of our team in regards to overall full-stack development. While our team already had the groundwork laid with previous experiences in programming languages, it did not apply very well when it came to creating a product with so many of us having a different array of skills.

Despite this, we overcame this by dividing the work into sections that each person could reasonably manage with some learning of their respective parts, as well as others to grasp a coherent understanding of the project at hand.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In terms of accomplishments, our team is very proud of creating a working product that we could showcase here that reasonably fit the target goal of the competition. Not to mention, learn extensively more about each other's knowledge regarding:

Web Development (creating structures for text and buttons to adding functions to those buttons and styling them)
Back End Development (developing a database and login system)
Online resources such as Amazon Web Services and Heroku to host and manage our website

Especially so, because we were able to apply it all and create a practical application that has functionality when managing data.

What we learned

We learned HTML, CSS, and Javascript for front-end development. Learning back-end, we used express.js to expedite development as it adapted similarities in javascript that we previously learned and applied it to where it was applicable for storing information behind the scenes and laying pages. Including amazon-dynamodb to have efficient document storage.