UH Mānoa Marketplace

UH Mānoa Marketplace is a web application developed by myself and a team of four other developers during the Spring 2019 semester while taking a software engineering course. The application is an online trading hub where students, faculty, and staff of the UH schools system can buy and sell personal items online. Sellers simply post an image and information about the items they want to sell, then buyers can browse the online catalog of postings and contact the sellers to setup an exchange. This application is great for students at all stages of their academic career. From those that are graduating or otherwise leaving who want to get rid of their things, to those who want to purchase a textbook for an upcoming semester at a more affordable price, or even those who just want to shop around. This application makes online shopping as a UH member simple an intuitive.

One feature that sets UH Mānoa Marketplace appart from other online shopping websites such as craigslist is its Trending Page. From this page, the latest posts that are gaining traction fast in the form of user favoriting the post are showcased on this page. There’s always something new and exciting to see here!

For a more comprehensive description of the web-app’s features and funtionality, check out the application’s GitHub webpage

Personal Contribution

Within the application development process, my major contribution dealt with the user’s profile. On the front-end, I designed the Profile page to show the users’ public information as well as their favorited items and the items they are currently listing for sale. In addition, I added functionality to this page which included the form submission functionality of the Edit Profile button fround on the page. On the back-end, I created the database of user profiles which various pages of the application pulled from and manipulated, and linked profile creation to the existing applications’ user signup feature. Keeping flexible, I also helped my group members with their tasks such as adding functionality to the Email button on each item, making the favorite icon on items ‘sticky’, and changing some logic to fix a sorting feature on the “For sale” page.

What I took away from this project

This project taught me so much about software development that I woudn’t even have considered before taking on this project. From this project alone, I learned how to work with frameworks, template applications, database management, debugging, application deployment, design, testing, and most importantly; developing as a team and project management. This project was my first experience developing a full scale application with a decently sized team of five members. I learned the importance of utilizing issue driven project management to sub divide a project into smaller project that multiple people can work on. I learned about the advantages and challanges of working with multiple people each with busy and dissimilar schedules can be. I learned about the importance of communication and how to rely on teammates for help as well as how to keep everyone on track. These last few I believe will become lessons that will remain with me for the rest of my software development career but each and every smaller lesson will make me a better developer.