AENEAS

Hawaii HOME Project

As the semester is coming to an end, so does one of the intriguing classes I took this semester ICS 414. For this course, me and my group were thrown straight into the task of creating a functional website for our clients from the Hawaii HOME Project. The problem that our clients had trouble with was keeping track of their inventory count through an excel sheet. What my group believed this project would end up being was a web version of the Excel sheet, we called it the glorified excel sheet. The main end goal we all visualized was to create functionality that our clients can use to keep track of medical inventory while being able to add, dispense, and edit. For me, the end goal did not seem complicated in my opinion, due to prior experience with project work and the simplicity of the functionality. However, implementing some of the ideas we had with the requests from our clients was quite difficult to uphold and it proved to be difficult at times. But as we neared the end of the project and semester, me and my groupmates can proudly say that it is more than a glorified Excel sheet.

My Contributions

My contributions to the project were improving our existing log history and implementing the dispensing functionality. These were tasks that I have decided to take on as I felt I had the clearest idea when it came to implementing these features.

In regards to the log history, I am quite familiar with SQL through my job. So I wanted to create something similar to what I used at work, that being an audit table. With SQL adding records to an audit table through the use of a trigger after an insert and delete can be considered simple. But with my experience with using MongoDB was quite frustrating in comparison to using SQL tables. Just creating an entirely new collection and pulling records from that collection into a table was quite annoying. It was often difficult to get the right fields from the collection with the changes that needed to be made. But I would say the end result was something I was proud of. In the log history, it was able to display the changes made through the add and dispense.

As for the dispense, the main functionality is to subtract a given amount from the inventory quantity of an existing medication. Initially, this was an easy task, given an ID of the record in the inventory collection we can update the quantity field of the inventory according to the amount that the user wants to dispense. However, when our clients requested to be able to dispense multiple medications, that was when our team began to struggle with this. I mainly took it upon myself to work on this task as I thought I had a clear idea of how this feature would work. However, my initial idea could be considered inefficient and counterintuitive as it required more steps for it to work. I had a friend tell me that a better method was to use modals, which made more sense, which in turn made the end product look as clean as it did. Working on this feature showed me how much I was inexperienced with React and how there are many ways to go about solving a problem.

Working With The Team

For this project, working with reliable groupmates made this project really fun. At the beginning of the project, I would struggle quite a bit since I did not continue ICS 414 right after ICS 314, as I took a semester break. And due to that decision, I struggled in the beginning, as I had to recall the basics of how Meteor and React worked. But as the semester progressed, I was able to relearn some basics and improve in some areas. While I say I am satisfied with our final project, there are some areas that our group could have improved upon such as:

Throughout this entire project, I have felt our team was successful due to our communication when it came to delegating tasks and discussing plans. A lot of our plans went smoothly due to one of our team members taking a leadership role in our project, Andre. It made me realize how important it is to have someone handle the talks of our meetings and give us a clear path on what needs to be done by the next milestone.

I hope as my time as a college student comes to a near end in the following year. I do hope there are other project opportunities such as this. As I can learn more about software development and gain more experience working with a team.

See our project page: Project Page

Find the Github Repo here: Github Repo