Switching Gears

We had our weekly meeting today, where we go around the group and discuss what we've been working on and plans for the future. Typically, this is a good place to get the answers I need to keep moving forward. As we are wrapping up the payments application, it's definitely time to start looking toward the future. My part of the payments application, at least for this version, is completely done. There is still some work to be done hooking up the backend with the frontend, but that gets out of my realm. We are rolling out quite a few changes in this version, and I think we really enhanced the application. We are now allowing for ACH payments and the representatives are now able to search for their lead, which leads them to be able to have most of the information in the forms following this step to be pre-filled from the lead's information. These are both UI changes that will be visually appealing, but we did much more behind the scenes to enhance the application that will largely go unnoticed. Moving over to using React-Hook-Forms was a huge improvement to the performance of the application, and as it grows, this will really come into play. Otherwise, we also cleaned up a ton of code and are really set up for subsequent versions.

First thing in the morning today, I sent off an email to someone who kind of supervises my work. I wouldn't call her my boss, in fact she's mainly the SEO Specialist, but she tends to manage our projects on a micro level for whatever reason. I told her we were pretty much wrapped up on the frontend and I would need to know where to go next. She got right back to me, letting me know this would be a question to pose to the CTO and that she would forward that email to him. She suggested I bring it up in the meeting we had today. In the meantime, she asked if I could look into a solution to a specific problem for her. In her articles, she wanted to add share buttons for Facebook and Twitter on each of these articles and didn't know how to go about doing it. I did a little digging and found the code to be able to do so, and it's surprisingly easy. The developer tools built for Facebook and Twitter are pretty well laid out and everything is pretty much built in. You just have to fill in the form, putting in what URL you want the button to share, and it autogenerates the code you would need for the button and the link. She hasn't implemented it yet, and I'm sure it'll be a little more difficult than that, but I don't think this is a hard problem to solve. I've done this in both a React application and a Gatsby application, and I believe they have some packages to assist with this, or in Gatsby's case, a plugin. It's even easier with these frameworks than it is with vanilla JavaScript, but I still think it will be pretty simple.

So, we got to the meeting and it came to my turn to share. I laid out what I had been doing in the last week, adding the features I've been asked to add and optimizing the code on the backend. Then, I let them know I would need a new project to work on. My cohort has been working on a React Native app for some time now, but he's been getting distracted from finishing it. They really want to roll it out, but it's still got a lot of work to be done on it. So, they asked him if it would be helpful to have me help him on it, or not. He thought it would be great to get some help on it, and said it would be nice to split up some of the work. At the same time, I was given some instructions on how we would go about doing the next version of the payments application. They want to add the option to add other products into the payments application, so while the representative is selling the estate plan, they can add some other products as well. I won't be able to do anything on it until I get more detailed information, but I have a feeling my attention is going to be on this React Native app for some time. I'm no expert in React Native, and this is some pretty advanced implementation of it, but I'll get up to speed pretty quickly. Tomorrow, I'm going to spend an hour or so in the morning with my cohort going over the application so he can explain everything to me, and then point me in the right direction as to where I should start my work. I got a hold of the code today, and it's pretty extensive. They've wanted this app to be rolled out for quite some time, but it's been getting pushed back. I think, though, if we can put our heads together, we can get it ready to go in a matter of weeks.