Last week was the first of two weeks focused on documentation and more general presentability. First, I added a favicon using favicon.io. This is a rather small detail, but I definitely think it adds a bit of polish. A slightly more involved task was adding a “home” page to the frontend. I changed around the routing so that the feed page previously at the root route / is now at /feed and a basic welcome page is now at the root route. This way, new visitors to the site are not immediately redirected to the login page with no explanation. I also made a few other changes like adding a command to show frontend test coverage and explicitly forbidding unsafe code in the backend (which there was already none of). Finally, I significantly expanded the README to include sections explaining the project’s concept, tech stack, features, design, testing, security/safety, and development/deployment.
This week will focus on creating demonstrations of the app’s features. Last week, I polished a few edges and added a lot of text, but one thing the documentation is still lacking is a strong visual component showing the app actually being used. I think the most digestible and accessible way of doing this would be creating GIFs for each point I want to show. If this somehow doesn’t work out, I could alternatively or supplementarily create one or more longer screen recordings and put links to them in the README.
In terms of impediments, I would say the biggest thing is just being in the last few weeks of the semester, both in terms of my overall workload and the need to bring this project to a close for now. However, I feel like I’ve still been able to get a solid amount of work on this project done each week. Fall break will also provide me with a bit more time to get ahead.
Last week was not as heavy of a process exploration week as some previous weeks. The tasks were more straightforward with less room for different approaches to completing them. However, this allowed me to reflect on my overall process across weeks. I’m glad that I put these kinds of tasks at the end of the semester so that I’m not worrying about implementing features or figuring out deployment for the first time at this point. The tasks for this upcoming week are similar in nature, so I expect that maintaining the same kind of process will be effective.