UH Clubr

Overview

UH-Clubr is a Meteor application which provides a directory of independent organizations at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. There are over 200 of these organizations but no student on campus knows about every single one of them, what they do as an organization or how to easily contact the person in charge of the organization. UH-Clubr hopes to aid students with exploring various types of clubs based on the students’ interests as well as the organizations with making themselves more visible to the possible future members of the club.

Throughout the Development

Throughout the development of UH-Clubr, I was mostly responsible for handling the back-end for the accounts registered as either a master admin (the admin that is in charge of the entire website as well as all the clubs) and a club admin (the admin that is only in charge of a specific club that he or she is responsible for). The functionalities of the admins included adding a verified club, editing the club information and deleting clubs that are no longer around. While most of the aspects were modified from the provided template from the course, I tried to incorporate other React components and aspects that weren’t built in the template. Although some of them could not be established on time for the final project, what I had intended on doing was making the website more user-friendly on both the administrator and the visitor part. One of the tasks that I could not complete was adding React step component to the add club page to inform the admin what information is necessary and what is optional, and also to make the experience on the website more pleasurable. In the future, I hope to be able to improve on the overall UI of the website as well as the back-end integration to allow for more functions, such as having the master admin grant authority to each club admin through the website.

Another aspect that I focused on throughout the development of UH-Clubr is adding the user profile component.

For the profile component, a new collection and schema was added to save the profile data from each user. When the user signs up to create an account with UH-Clubr, he or she is redirected to the add profile page which allows them to input basic information about themselves such as their major, interest and a short bio. He or she is then allowed to go back to their profile page any time to edit their profile. With the current deployed application, a new user who comes to the site may click on the button that reads “notify me when new clubs get added,” but the function is not yet implemented. In the future, I would like to notify the users on the database when new clubs that meet their interests get added, so that the user doesn’t have to keep coming back to the site to check if there are newly added clubs or not.

From this experience…

This is the second computer science group project that I have worked on since starting college. Since the first one wasn’t so successful, I had continuously told myself that I had to work hard for this project and had been stressed out about it at first. What this group project taught me is that working together and communicating effectively is really important in group projects. I learned that while it’s important to be responsible for the tasks assigned to each of us, it is also important to talk to other group members if I’m struggling with a task because someone else might be more familiar with the problem and would be able to solve the problem faster than me just searching all over the internet and trying out multiple suggested solutions.

Aside from the soft skills that I learned from this project, I was also able to obtain a better understandig of Meteor, React, Javascript and Github. It was a great opportunity to see if I could actually apply what I learned to a working product. It was rewarding to see the web application develop and improve overtime with everyone’s hard work. Personally, I have never liked group projects; it’s not unusual to have some members work harder than others while some may not do anything at all. But with this project, I would like to say it was an eye-opening experience as I now like working with other people. I learned that working together as a team (effectively) is better than trying to solve all the issues by myself and saves time greatly as each of us focuses on areas that we are proficient in.