Background
Hi y’all! This is Rosaleen, and I’ll be writing biweekly blog posts with updates from the team working on the mobile application and website: me, Dr. Paul Toprac, and Thomas Schwalen. Every week, I’ll discuss the progress we’ve made during the past two weeks, what we’ve learned, and what we have planned.
For some background on the project, our goal is to build a mobile application and website to deliver an LGBTQIA+-centered health curriculum to Indian healthcare providers. Each week, we will work on creating a product that is accessible, easy to maintain, and user-friendly.
Current progress
This week, we focused mostly on setup. We created our Github repo and decided to use Google Cloud Platform to host our back end databases in MySQL. After considering a lot of different options, we decided to use React to build the front end portion of the website. We also came up with a basic schema of how the app and website data will be laid out in our databases.
What we have learned
Through considering different options for frameworks and platforms for both our front end and back end, Thomas and I have learned a lot about the various factors to consider when selecting a platform, such as portability, price, ease of use, global accessibility, features necessary for the project, and future project members’ familiarity with the framework. We ultimately selected React because it will be easy to use and transfer to different platforms, which will make it easier for us to make the transition of maintenance over the app to our NGO partners. We picked Google Cloud Platform for similar reasons, but we also took price into account. We’ve also learned a lot about what to consider when designing a product, such as accessibility, use cases, technological context (for example, the prevalence of iOS vs. Android), and ease of use. Finally, we’ve learned a lot of databases themselves, such as best practices for creating, structuring, and maintaining them.
What we have planned
During the next two weeks, we’re planning to actually start coding! Thomas will be working more on the front end, while I will be doing more on the back end. In two weeks, we hope to have solidified and coded a final layout for the databases containing the information stored in the app and website, as well as created a functioning front end with the ability to display pages and different tabs and the capability to click on those tabs to visit different pages on the website. I’ll post another update in two weeks, so see you then!