Tight Deadlines

We finally started moving ahead with the functionality of the React Native project today. Up until this point, I had mainly been tasked with building out the scaffolding for a couple of the pages. This wasn't an easy task, but I have it in a very presentable condition at this point. All of the data in these pages, though, is just hard coded in. I need to be able to grab that data from an API that is called from a search query, but that API hasn't been built yet. It's a pretty complicated API, with multiple filters and sorting methods, and is going to give the user plenty of options to customize their search. The backend is written in C#, and I don't yet know C#, so I have to leave the API build to my cohort. Until today, he's been working on a method for authentication, which is integral for the site and a huge chunk of our work in this project. He pretty much finished this up yesterday, so he moved on to building the API today. He still has quite a bit of work to do on it, but he made a good amount of progress on it. From there, I can hook up the call to the API using Axios and customize it with all of the filters and sorts. I don't know exactly how this is going to end up looking, with all the options, but I can at least get it functioning once he finishes building it out.

I spent the first part of the day in an uphill battle with React Router. Because we are building this app to be mobile-ready and web-ready at the same time, there are some issues that come into play with compatibility from time to time. React Router has 2 different versions; one for React Native and one for React. I made a component this morning that would dynamically come in differently for native or for the web. This component acts as a link and just wraps whatever it is you want to be a link to other screens on the site. It was only a few lines, but it will definitely be used all over this app. I was getting all kinds of errors towards the end of yesterday and into this morning when I was trying to hook up this link before I realized I would have to create 2 different versions. When I finally got it all hooked up, I still got a big hairy error when I tried to compile it for the web. Apparently, whenever anything is done in our web-only folder, you have to rebuild the project before starting it back up on the local server. It took me way too long to ask my cohort what the heck was going on, so I ended wasting the better part of an hour on this one. Before our weekly meeting, I spent a couple hours with him looking at how he set up the API in C#. I learned a lot, but I'm far from being able to do it on my own.

When I presented what I had created so far in the meeting and my cohort had done the same, we were posed with the same question we have been posed every time the project is discussed: when will it be done? My cohort had control of this project for quite some time, but he was never able to spend an appropriate amount of time on it to make any progress, so I think the executives were getting a little impatient about it. They want it done by the beginning of June, which seems crazy. As I've stated before, this is a massive application, and there is a ton that's going into it. That being said, we got a ton accomplished in the last week, and if we can keep moving forward, we might stand a chance. I think we found out why they are so adamant about getting this done as fast as possible, though. Apparently, there is some application that will help us move our entire company to be fully digital. This already exists, but it's written in Vue, and by my cohort's account, the code is really bad. They want to roll this out by the time we move into our new building in November. When I discussed it with my cohort, he thought between the 2 of us, it could take us between 4 and 8 months to complete. I really have no idea what all this application encompasses, but he's under the impression that it completely dwarfs the large application we are building right now. I'm excited to have plenty to do, but we are going to be under the gun for quite some time to come.

Until tomorrow!