Nerd Alert

Week 9

This week I was put on a group project for the Theater and Arts Guild of Omaha (TAG). TAG has many members that pay a membership fee. These members also attend live performances and plays throughout the year. The project is to create an app that allows the members of TAG to submit their nominations online (up to 5 per category) along with a list of the performances that member attended that year. Once the nominations are received the nomination ballot will be weighted according to the number of performances the member has attended. After all of the nominations are weighted and tallied the final ballot will be created and sent out to each member for the winner to be determined.

This project has a lot more customized aspects than I had originally expected. For example, some members will still choose to mail in a paper nomination ballot instead of filling one out online. This means that there must be an admin to log into the site and enter the paper ballots on their behalf to have accurate results. So I spent the first few days working with the team to create a database and issues to assign to each of our team members. When it came time to start divvying up tasks Sumeet made a point to say that we should NOT be placing (who we felt were) the team’s strongest coders on the back-end of the project and the not so strong coders on the front-end. So with the exception of member who preferred front end the rest of us started working on tasks for the back end. I quickly found that there was not enough to keep us all busy and we were duplicating efforts to learn about these new devise and administer gems we just installed. So I decided that I would join the front-end for this project.

I had little faith in my abilities based on my previous assignments but I do know that it’s not hard to get a few buttons and forms on a screen with CSS. It may look like a website from the 90’s but at least it will look like a real website. I decided to checkout the code on the currently up an running website for TAG and stole a chunk for their navigation bar and it looked AWESOME! Turns out… its pretty easy to make an awesome website just by “borrowing” the code from a different one. So that’s what I did! I took the Who buttons, I took the Who headers, I tooks the who dropdowns, and I even took the Who banners and it looked awesome! So my conclusion is I rock front-end as long as I can steal code.