The End of this Journey
I have been part of an amazing journey through Lambda School in becoming a FullStack Developer. The last stop for this journey is Labs.
Let’s Start at Step One…. What is Lambda?
Lambda School is an Online School located in Silicon Valley, which was founded by Austen Allred in 2017. Lambda School started as a single short course in functional programming; however, by 2019 Lambda expanded into a full nine month bootcamp. Now in 2021, Lambda School has both part-time and full-time courses allowing students the ability to choose their learning path in either Data Science or Full Stack Web Development.
The one thing that is unique about Lambda School is that they invest in their students. How do they invest in their students you ask? By allowing students to pay when they get hired and they receive a salary of $50,000 or more a year. Austen Allred believed that the “traditional” model of higher education was broken. That every year students take on thousands of dollars in student debt in hopes of landing a job after college. Allred believed there had to be a better way to approach education and came up with “Instead of asking our students to bet on us, we bet on them first”.
Next up….. What is “Labs” in Lambda?
Labs is an in-house apprenticeship where we, the students work in groups on specific projects that Lambda chooses for us.
Lambda tries to create what it’s like to work on a project by giving us a real development environment. This includes interfacing and working with project mangers, stakeholders and working with different teams (such as Data Science, IOS, Frontend and Backend teams).
Students go through the steps of planning a project by using the following tools:
- Trello Board — to keep us organized
- User Stories — to understand the need of our website/app
- User Flow — to show the path taken on our website/app to complete a task
- Wireframes — to determine the functionality in the interface.
Introducing….. Our Project and Team
Our team consisted of nine Developers.
- Four Data Science Developers
- Five FullStack Developers
As a team we worked on a project called “CitySpire”.
The Mission:
“Be a one-stop resource for users to receive the most accurate city information.”
What is CitySpire?
“An app that analyzes data from cities such as populations, cost of living, rental rates, crime rates, park (walk score), and many other social and economic factors that are important in deciding where someone would like to live. This app will present such important data in an intuitive and easy to understand interface.
…Use data to find a place right for you to live.”
What Problems did We Face?
It has been a little over a year since I first enrolled in Lambda. And many of our projects were created by scratch either by ourselves or as a team. However, for this project, we had to use a legacy code base. Now, you can look at legacy code in one of two different ways:
- “ Yay! We don’t have to create a whole new website from scratch, so adding new features should be super easy. (silent evil laugh deep in my subconscious because it knows that is a lie)”
OR
2. “Oh! There is code in here. What does it do, how does it work. Seriously, what is Okta, Mapbox and Ant Design? Oh my goodness, why does this website look like Mardi Gras just puked on my screen? “
(I definitely bounced back and forth between these two viewpoints while working on this project…)
Another problem our team dealt with was working with many libraries and tools we had not learned yet, such as Okta, Mapbox, Ant Design, Whimsical and AWS. But the real challenge was understanding how the website worked and how the last team visualized it in order to make any concrete decisions as a team for our finial product.
Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover
We received our project repo’s for both the front and back end. We had to do the usual clone and npm install, along with updating our environment folders with the proper credentials. Once those steps were completed it was time to see what the project looked like …. npm start, here we go!
The website popped up and… all you saw was a login modal (dang it!). There was no way for us to create a new account so we had to go to our documentation to find the username and password. Once we figured out that we needed to look at our Okta documentation for the login information we were able to see the landing page.
The layout was not a pretty scene, it was styled in Mardi Gras colors and nothing was properly sized or centered.
As the subtitle above states, you cannot judge a book by it’s cover; yes it wasn’t pretty but there was legit functionality. They were able to link to Okta for authentication, parts of Mapbox was working, there was routing, and there were seeds in the backend. There was a lot of thought and work put into this website (so nice job, legacy team!).
World of Technical Creation
I was part of the Design Lead Team that Lambda is trying to test out for Labs. This team consisted of twenty students that wanted to experience this new option. In these meeting we discussed how important user stories are and how they related to the website/app itself. We examined how a user-friendly interface is important and that it can make or break your customer base. Meaning, you really want to optimize functionality in order to increase user involvement.
In these meetings we used a tool called Whimsical. Whimsical is a visual workspace for teams to create flowcharts, diagrams, virtual sticky notes and more. I personally used Whimsical to create my wireframe and flowchart. We were also able to document our back end JSON objects as well as create a todo list for updates to the website. Whimsical was a great tool to get everything in one spot visually for the team.
To be honest, it did take me about four hours to figure out how to create my wireframe. There were so many options that it was exciting and overwhelming at the same time. I did create seven windows and two login modals to break down my thoughts of what I was visualizing for the website. Once I had my wireframe created I needed to present it to my peers in the Design Lead Team.
There were so many amazing ideas and creativity that was shared, I was very excited to be part of this new experience.
After presenting my wireframe to my Design Lead Team, it was time to share it with my CitySpire team so they could review and give feedback. So during my team review, we decided we wanted to change the home page. Instead of having the login modal immediately pop up, we altered the workflow so the landing page would be the first item the user encountered. We then worked on the layout of the landing page, by:
- Picking out new city images and colors for website
- Creating a drop down menu for login, create account, and logout
- Moving the pinned cities into the drop down menu
- Moving the search bar from the middle of the page to the top of the page in the navbar
- Creating and updating Logo
- Updating the search icon to read “Map View”
- Cleaning up the page and added features: Best Schools, Safest Cities, Most Dangerous Cities, Top Job Markets, Average Rental Costs, and Best Weather
- Updating City Dashboard to show: city, state, features, and cities that are similar
- Updating pinned Cities page
We are still in the early stages of this application; however, we have included a small amount of data for the following features: school data, rental data, job data, weather data, safest cities and the most dangerous cities. This is just the beginning of a working application. There are still bugs and functionality that need to be worked out before we expand to new features. With the right amount time and research this could be an amazing application for users to discover a perfect location for vacation or just to find that perfect town to settle down in.
I have learned a lot (so much!) through this journey. Lambda School challenged me every day by providing tools and projects to sharpen my skills. Tools such as: HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Redux and Express. And due to the sprints and steady cadence set by Lambda I definitely improved my ability to plan and execute code and meet deadlines. And with this new knowledge, I will continue to push myself to learn as I grow, knowing that new challenges will always be there for me to meet.
