My journey with Keeping mom and infants healthy (aka NuMom)
My journey with NuMom started at Florida International University, as part of my senior project. The initial idea of this application was to provide help to new mothers with low income who don’t have access to many resources by giving them information on how to take care of their children. Most of the time, single moms have to work and take care of many things, and because of that, they don’t have much time to do complete research to know what they need. Also, young ladies don’t know how to sexually protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies or AIDS. Therefore, this app provides new moms and young ladies with a lot of resources and information that would help them and make their lives easier.
Situation:
NuMom is a smartphone-based maternal/infant healthcare application designed for low-income minority mothers that provides support in 3 different languages (English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole). The current system is available for iOS and Android devices. It would let users create an account and get access to facilities like clinics and shelters, information, and resources. The user can also create an appointment with the clinic that would be closest to their location and keep track of their children’s immunizations and health needs.
It was built using JavaScript as the main language, ExpoCLI(React Native) as the running environment, and Firebase as the database. The main purpose of the application in its current state is to provide early and continued access to health care for prenatal and postnatal mothers. As part of my senior project class, I joined a group of people that were already working on the app. Meaning, the application was already built and almost working perfectly.
Task:
Therefore, my task was to work on the issue someone else found while testing the app. For that, we use GitHub, and every time someone on the team finds a bug in the app they’ll create a GitHub issue. In that way, we could work on it and once fix create a pull request that would be verified and merged by the team lead. Also, the other way around, if I found any error I’ll create an issue so either someone else in the team or myself can fix it.
Action:
One of the many issues I worked on was fixing a website button that was leading nowhere. The application has a list of the location of different clinics and shelters that a mother can visit to get help and those buttons weren’t working. I first checked the code that handles the buttons looking for errors but it all looked ok. Nonetheless, I noticed it was using information from the database to open the URL that was connected to the button. That’s how I got to the conclusion that the error must be in the database. Then I checked the database and realized that the links were incorrectly typed. They had extra information, such as the scheme of the URL (the website protocol https://). For example, a URL was like https://www.example.com, and since we already declared it as a URL it wasn’t necessary to have the scheme, they all should look like this: example.com. Then, once I removed the extra info from the URL in the database, the issue was fixed. I also worked on upgrading to Expo 42 at the time and the required dependencies to be able to deploy the application.
Results:
After the main issues and the upgrades were finished the application was successfully deployed by other people on the team.
Learning:
After doing this project I learned a lot. It was a new experience since it was the first time I joined a team that was already started. I learned I was able to get to speed with a project that was going on using technologies that were new for me such as React Native, Expo, and Firebase. Also, in this case, were more people working on the project and the workflow was more than what I was used to. Therefore, one of the initial issues that I learned how to deal with was merging conflicts. In conclusion, it was a huge learning and teamwork experience for me.
To access more information and the code source of this project go here.
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