Day 8/9: The Final Countdown
Day 8, only a few days left and the app is looking a lot better for it. Most of the features we had limited ourselves to were implemented with just a couple of blockers:
State: Once we start up the chat bot we were having some trouble accessing the state of the components which the bot rendered. our default state was loaded up as soon as it was loaded leaving no time for the parent to actually access the api and update itself.
Deployment: Although the chat room was now running locally this was not available on our heroku deployment.
We also needed to work on styling as well as filling out some of the conversations with the bot so that it felt more substantial.
After a conversation with one of the coaches we managed to get the state issue sorted. Because our chat bot’s steps were not wrapped in a render their properties were not being reloaded when state was updated. Me and Caroline found two different solutions to this. Caroline fixed it the sensible way, by moving the steps into a separate component. I found a janky alternative by passing down a function to my chat room which pulled data from the parent component on load.
One area which didn’t work so well was Heroku deployment. Although the web sockets for development and production were defined, production was still running into some issues going into day 9.
With the pie chart working Kat and Caroline could set their minds to adding content to the chatbot and (despite some merge conflicts from other members of the group… Me) they had the conversation feeling more abundant by the end of the day.
Sumeet set to work on creating the presentation which we would use on the Friday. We had a dry run on this on Day 9 so everyone was feeling a little apprehensive about how it would go.
Day 9
It worked! So it turns out that if you are spending a vast amount of time trying to get something to work without much success it may make sense to consider whether the problem was actually what you thought it was… The actual problem was that the database wasn’t updating properly. After a db:reset we were up and running.
With the chat bot and chat rooms working we spent most of the day focused on styling and preparing our presentation for the following day… Wish us luck!
