CS 373 Spring 2020: Abhi Velaga
What did you do this past week?
This past week I made our site entirely mobile friendly as well as implemented the majority of the sorting, filtering, and searching UI for our frontend. I also added the splash search and a new splash search page to display the results of the search on. Since we submitted it for phase 3 I’ve been working a lot on making UI refinements for small details that affected the quality of the site such as inconsistent styling across components, messy chunks of text, and a bug we had with weird characters appearing in our pagination menu.
What’s in your way?
I’ve got nothing blocking me. There are no pending endpoint tasks that are preventing my development. Instead I’m focusing now on refactoring our code and cleaning up the UI as I learn more about proper web design and practices.
What will you do next week?
I’m working everyday now on cleaning up the UI — I’ve made sure we’re using components from only one or two libraries for consistency and am cleaning up unused styles. I want to eventually get our code as clean as possible with as few pages, instead finding ways to reuse the list page code for each page. I’m also eager to tackle the extra credit option of comparing model instances.
What was your experience of more SQL? (this question will vary, week to week)
I generally tend to prefer front end/design work over backend but I’ve actually really been enjoying SQL — it makes a lot of sense to me and I see tremendous value in it for application development.
What made you happy this week?
I got much deeper into and passionate about front end/UI/UX design this week. I’ve been finding website designs that I like and watching google talks of senior UI/UX designers sharing their thoughts and ideas.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I’ve been looking a lot at Google’s Material Design system this week. It’s really fascinating how much thought and effort went into finding a cohesive design philosophy they liked and how they went about implementing. I still however find myself leaning more towards Apple’s design philosophy that our screens are like portals into other words rather than Google’s inclination to try to recreate familiar physics and lighting as their UI.
