Entry: Starting From the Ground Up
I argued with myself for the whole entire ten-minute walk to the Shift House the day of the first Open House. I should probably go, right? I mean, the club seemed really cool when I saw their table at Northfest and there’s nothing to really lose by going…
I still stood outside the house for a full two minutes and paced around to work up the courage to go inside.
At Open House, I was surprised by how the people I was talking with were all so passionate and unique. Each project was a chance for exploration and being a person with a lot of past artistic stints, from creating my own T-shirts to graphic design, I was sold.
For my project, I wanted to create a mobile app. It doesn’t sound out of the ordinary for a computer science major to create an app — after all, isn’t that what half of those productivity apps are? But for me, it was out of my comfort zone. I wasn’t even quite sure I wanted to be a computer science major! My first exposure to computer science was the semester before in my Intro to Programming class, but having that knowledge was nothing like building a functional application from the ground up. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and learn more about development.
My project, entry, is a social journaling app where users can create a journal entry using our journal template, put the entries in a journal and share journals with friends so that friends can keep updated on their lives. The template asks for information like their mood, a song they’re obsessed with, highlights from the day, and their general thoughts. The major feature I want to implement in the app is a filter feature where people can go into a journal and filter for a specific field, like song, and find a list of all of the songs that had been in entries in the journal, which essentially creates a playlist of songs that person has been listening to. I was inspired to create this project because I realized that it’s hard for me to stay in contact with friends that I don’t see everyday, and being a journaler, reading what was going on in their lives would be a great way to stay in the loop.
A lot of the focus of my project was on the backend of my project. I built it using React Native and I had no experience with Javascript and very little with HTML. Using React Native with Firebase was a little tricky for me before I had never worked with it extensively and I didn’t quite know how to structure to data so that I wouldn’t have all of it nested. However, I managed to be able to push data onto the database under my own user and pull it into a journal entry. I’m still working on the home screen and displaying a section of each entry as a “feed,” as well as how to display the entries as part of different journals. I also had so much trouble with Expo because I kept installing packages incorrectly, but that was definitely just a problem specific to me.
Beyond just the technical skills that I learned, I am extremely grateful for the people that I have met through this organization. They have taught me how to explore my own interests and create some for myself, regardless if it’s something I’m currently comfortable doing. After seeing what they’ve been doing in sandbox, I’ve learned that they’re crazy and passionate and it really inspires me to continue my project through the summer.
I’m really glad that I didn’t talk myself out of going to Open House. I’ve become more sure about myself and my direction this year, and that’s something that I learned from working on my project.
Wen is a student studying Computer Science. She likes polar bears and making T-shirts and graphic design. She chillin.
