Beyond the Library

For a student, finding spots to study can become a hassle when all their exposed to is whats in their path everyday. Even moreso when the path/routine that they have, doesn’t have any spots at all or the spot is always busy. Some ways they could mitigate their problem is break from their routine and find and discover spots on their own or ask fellow classmates or friends for ideas. Beyond the Library seeks to ensure that such a problem would not plague the University of Hawaii students by creating an online platform for discovering, commenting and submitting their own spots.

At the heart of Beyond the Library is community engagement, we want to make sure that all the information on a spot is easy and interesting to find. One aspect that pushes that notion is through the discover spots page, where the main idea is to hold a catalogue of all the spots the community has posted. The page contains pictures, a description and a section that let’s student’s read and/or post their own comments about a specific spot. Another interesting aspect is our map integration, we believed that the main page should contain an aggregated information about all the notes posted at all the spots. This is to make sure students get to see all the updates. As mentioned, each student is allowed to recommend their own spots but with a vetting process that makes sure the spot is legit and satisfactory.

My contribution to the project was establishing the layout of the landing page, the user profile page and the maps page. The Landing page received a major overhaul from it’s first inception, since my previous design had too much scrolling to do that provided no benefit to the user. The user profile page also received another overhaul since the logic behind it was not as fleshed out as all the other components of the web app.

The maps page used a library called Leaflet, which allowed me to access open-sourced map data to create an interactive map and place pins on said map. I also introduced the commenting system to each spot in the discover page and the maps page. Clicking on a pin on the maps page replaces the feed with a card that reveals information about the spot.

Overall, this project reached very close to what our ultimate goal was. If we could extend for another week or two then new features such revamping the profile page and making the map component move with the scroll wheel could have been implemented. Beyond the Library left me with such an interesting outlook about the interaction between the database and the front-end side of the web application. By far the most difficult and time consuming process was interacting with the database, but it also meant that it was the most rewarding once everything clicked together. I aim to go beyond as I move on my software engineering career.