Hoppy Trails is a full-stack application that allows registered users to view a full list of breweries in Cleveland, OH, and be able to review them. The second primary feature is viewing curated brewery “trails” based on what makes them great. Users can view those breweries and mark trails as ‘Complete’ when finished. Marking a trail ‘Complete’ adds a stamp to their profile. From gathering and constructing data in SQL to creating a review system from scratch, this app utilizes everything a group of us learned from Tech Elevator. During the two-week build process, we had daily stand-up meetings with our project manager, along with a weekly check-in with our project owner.
Tech Stack Used:
– Database: SQL Server
– Backend: .NET, C#
– Frontend: VUE.JS, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap
During the Build
We were very excited to do this project. All of us in the group enjoyed beer slightly more than the average person, so it was easy to stay motivated. Early on we found it was easiest to split the duties based on people’s strengths. Two on the backend, two on the frontend, and one (me) maintaining the database. I feel like this allowed us to be very efficient early on and check off a lot of our goals fairly quickly.
Our project owner was in charge of the overall vision. Whatever they say, goes. One of their goals for us was to have suggestions for people not wanting to spend time looking for breweries that fit their preferences. We had a bunch of ideas for people’s preferences but we narrowed it down to four given the time constraint.
- Family-friendly
- Dog-Friendly
- Budget-Friendly
- Including a patio
During our meeting with the project owner, we thought that instead of just listing breweries out, we should turn them into bar crawls. And so, the name “Hoppy Trails” was born.
We also decided that one principle that we need to stick to is ease of use. We wanted to minimize the amount of clicks or taps it took to get what you came there for.
Challenges
Apart from this project needing to contain everything we learned over an intense three-month period. Most of the challenges that we had to overcome were time management and keeping a level head. Even though our project owner had clear goals we needed to meet, we wanted to go above and beyond for all of those goals.
There was the occasional “Can we even do this?”, but we were able to lean on our coding instructors to help us if we got too ambitious.
What Would I Change?
Nothing. It was perfect.
I’m obviously kidding. One of the biggest things I would change has nothing to do with the app. It was having everyone in the group work on one aspect of the project. This made us extremely efficient at the start, but it made it hard to fix bugs when they inevitably came.
Conclusion
Overall I was very happy with the overall functionality of the app. We hit all of our goals and stuck to our core principles. We had a tiny hiccup in our final presentation when looking at a user’s profile but it was an easy fix. This was an amazing learning experience and Tech Elevator made a huge effort to mimic a real-life work project.