Capstone and Beyond

The last month I've been working on my final project for Atlas School , a project that once I heard about it I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

Intro

Several months ago, I overheard Jessica Dison and Ryan Donaldson discussing their capstone idea: partnering with the BeHeard Movement in Tulsa, OK, to modernize their paper-based client processes. Having built systems for local pet rescues, I wanted to build something that helps people, so I knew this was a project I wanted to join. I offered my help, and we laid the groundwork together.

The Team

The Team was headed by Jessica Dison , our Project manager who laid the framework down for us, breaking each step up into obtainable goals in Jira, and stayed in contact with our contacts so we remained on task and on goal.

Ryan Donaldson who was our Full Stack Dev, he saved me multiple times throughout this project. Any of the things that I missed or couldn't figure out, he was there to take care of.

And Me, the Lead Developer. I went full speed ahead and laid out the groundwork for the project, adding and updating Features as we went along.

What is BeHeard Queue?

First, the BeHeard organization provides showers and services to at-risk and un-housed people. Currently, everything they do from the clients perspective is pen and paper or whiteboards. They've done the research, and roughly 90% of their clients have access to a cell phone with data, so why not create a system that allows their users to book their own appointments and track the status of their services?

BeHeard Queue can be described as a few things, but at the heart of it, it's a Property Management System. For Admins, it allows them to configure their property and set up services how they would like. For Users, it allows them to book Appointments and receive notifications as needed. Additionally, there's a TV-Display that shows live data of their appointments by service, so everyone on sight can see the wait times and where they need to go.

The Tools we used

BeHeard Queue is built with React and Next.JS to allow easy transitions from web to mobile. The Back-end and application itself is hosted on Firebase, something I had not used before. We created quite a few API calls to obtain user data, appointment data, so that all data can be displayed live. Actually, all of the booking methods, checks and balances are done via API's, as we were trying to develop this to be used with minimal hardware required. If your phone can access the internet, you can definitely use this app.

A Short Demo

The Following video is the one we used during our presentation, the beginning portion goes over the Admin side for BeHeard Queue, and the 2nd half is showcasing the User's side.

Challenges

The Challenges we faced during this time was making sure no appointments would overlap another appointment, or that they overbooked themselves in a single day. There are many checks and balances happening when a user books an appointment, both when they are making their selections and one final time when they submit their appointment, just so we're sure there is no overbooking. Another Challenge was not getting ahead of ourselves, the more we added the more we wanted to add, but to make sure we had a fully functioning, usable product come demo-day, we made sure we stuck with the basics we sat out to do.

Learning Objectives

My main learning objective was creating an entire, usable product using React and Next.JS. We had used it a few times at School, but never to create something as complex as this. Also, I really wanted to get down in the trenches with Firebase, something that seems extremely complicated from the outside but after navigating it (And watching countless YouTube Videos..), I realized it's not nearly daunting as it seems.

Conclusion.

In the end, we created exactly what we set out to do, with a little more functionality than we originally planned which is definitely a positive. However, this is not the end for either of these projects, we still have lots to do and a long way to go, but the most important part is that we started. The Reaction and feedback we've gotten since announcing this project and demoing it has been extremely positive, it's very rewarding!

You can check out the code in it's current form here https://github.com/bcart01v/BeHeardQueue