MEGANNE JIMENEZ

• Lessons Learned

  • The biggest lesson learned for me was underestimating how long it would take to learn React Native and Firebase. React Native was entirely new to me, AND I had never written much in javascript, either. I feel like there was not a lot of documentation for the things that we wanted to accomplish, especially when it came to Firebase. Firebase took a while to actually implement because I had to look through a lot of files and add lines of code (even though the documentation was not clear on where to put those lines of code). The way to actually reference a storage bucket is not specifically documented anywhere either. So I felt like I was trying to figure out everything by trial and error, but I eventually was able to figure both out. 

  • I'm not sure if this is a "lesson learned", but it's very difficult to write code with someone else, and updating the github wasn't something that either of us was used to. I think in the future I would've tried to figure out how to use github better so that the process of finding the new code that my partner wrote without changing the new code I had written. 

  • I liked the agile process and I'm glad I know how it works now. Looking back on it now, the 2 week long explore phase always threw me off because I've never been anyone to start something 2 weeks "early", so I had to quickly adjust to actually working on the phase in advance. 

  • Lastly, I think I need to speak up to my partner when I'm struggling with something because I felt like I was trying (probably too) hard to figure out stuff by myself, which made me feel like I was doing a lot of the work. I also think having to split up the work made this difficult because we were both focused on getting our own stuff done first.

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• Technical Review

  • Since we met our MVP, the ideal next step for Soapbox would be to take our app to some developers so they can finish it out. This would include cleaning up the code/file structure, and adding different components (like improving the UI for the audio and video) and complex navigation that we weren't able to accomplish.

  • Same goes for the website, which would to build it out further and also get it set up with a database. I'm not sure if Soapbox wants to continue to use Firebase in the future, but for the near future, it's a good option for demo purposes. 

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• Future Plans

  • We personally won't be working on the project anymore, but Soapbox's goal was to use what we made to bring to potential investors for demo purposes, and then get those developers working on everything so that it's ready for the app store/live website.