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Coding Challenge Wrap-Up
Episode 25
In this episode we discuss our recently completed coding challenge, making "No BS News for Reddit"
Note: We had some audio issues with the first upload of this episode, if you hear nothing, simply delete your version and re-download to get the updated file. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Segment 1 - Pre-Planning & Design- As apart of this challenge we were allowed to plan, design, and research before the challenge began
- To prepare we did some research on PWAs and their functionality
- We also researched other news apps, and what subreddits would be the most useful
- From a UX perspective, we took a look at which features a Reddit user would need and expect from a Reddit app - minus the social features of course
- From this we came up with some wireframes to guide our design throughout the process, which we modified on the spot to accomodate for a “open Reddit post” button alongside alternative share options for PC users
- We also had a discussion regarding the addition of custom news sets, where users could select a bunch of subreddits to pull into a single custom feed - this ended up using up a decent amount of time and we didn’t put it into the app in its current state
- One other design challenge that we had was making the design pop
- Since this sort of app is so text-heavy we were concerned that its monotone nature would end up making it boring, or otherwise, look unfinished and rushed. However, after spending more time on Reddit we realized that this type of app is more utilitarian than it is flashy, so we decided to place it in a dark theme and let the links “do the talking”
Segment 2 - App Development
- Development went smoothly for the most part
- We were able to complete almost all the features that we originally set out to make, including a few extra ones
- We had a few bugs popup that were dealt with quickly, namely some responsivity issues with overlapping and some time stamps that were coming in as negative numbers
- Vuejs seemed to almost accelerate development due too it’s built in development server and its short code nature for functions and listeners
- Vuejs also created the template for the PWA functionality through the Vue CLI
- App functionality implementation went as planned and didn’t pose much difficulty other then a couple of hiccups and glitches that had to be fixed
- Showing how much time has elapsed since each post was posted showed to be kind of annoying because of how reddit handles UTC time. I have to multiple the time by 1000 to match with the the current UTC time
- Working with the reddit api is awesome and a great way to learn API’s and working with json
- The app is pretty much feature complete as in line with our MVP (minimum viable product)
- Couple of features we are looking to add would be :
- a way to create a custom news group
- Light theme to go along with the current dark one
- The motto for adding features to this is “Is that bullshit?” if we think it is, then we don’t add it
Segment 3 - App Deployment
- So we’ve already had a few episodes where we talk about deployment in a little more detail but it’s valuable to mention how we went about doing this for the 24 hour challenge aspect
- This
Published on 6 years, 11 months ago