My Last STA Blog Post Ever

I applied for this job because I got rejected for a calculus tutor position and I’ve never been more glad to get rejected for anything. Being an STA was the most perfect job that I could’ve found as a college student. I’ve grown so much during my time here in ways that I would’ve never imagined; not only in my technical skills but social too, like organization, leadership and communication. There are many things I like about this job, the people, the nature of the work, the flexibility; but more than anything I like that the people here care about you and want to help you improve. There are also a lot of things that I will regret, not finishing my last project, not being able to attend more STA meetings. All in all, I just hope that I left a good mark in this place. I’m starting a new job at Amazon in August, and I’m taking all the skills I learned here to help me succeed there too. Hopefully, I’ll be able to come back in a couple of years and help others find success too.

Trapezites: Last Update

This is my last week as an STA (stay queued for my last blog post) so I’ll be working on wrapping up this project.

Stacy and I had a meeting with Joey (the client) and Lesser (the designer) about 3 weeks back. I feel like it was really productive. There was a lot of details about how some things would look or be implemented that were not very clear before the meeting, but now we’ve managed to get a really great final draft for me and Lesser to work on. The only drawback is that the new design looks pretty different from what I had already implemented, so it’ll be a lot of work to get it to where it needs to be. Here are the pictures for the new design and the website that it’s based on.

Since I only have 1 shift left, I will not be able to get the website to this point. My main goal is to make it so that the next person that works on it (probably Estella) can pick it up easily. This probably means clean up the code A LOT, fix a couple of bugs and setup the HTML to look more like the new layout. Also, I need to add some comments explaining what each function does and how they work. I’m honestly a little sad I didn’t get to follow this project all the way through, but I think my contribution will be important in the end. This is what it looks like as of now.

Ancient Currencies/Trapezites

I haven’t been doing a great job at updating my blog this semester. Needless to say, a LOT of stuff has happened since my last post.

When I originally started the Ancient Currencies project, it was supposed to be a 1-2 week project that Stacy gave me to keep me busy until I started my official duties as remote STA and Cascade advisor. I managed to do a lot of progress in those first 2 weeks and the goal of having a Minimum Viable Product for the site was achieved in time to show the client. I based my original design in the Google currency converter, it looked like this:

While this design was a good start, we quickly realized that being able to convert between two unknown ancient currencies didn’t really give any useful information to the user. Instead, we decided to make the user choose a single currency and then convert it to others in the same period as well as different commodities (salaries, food, goods) to give the user a better perspective of what it was worth. I also added a useful map to visually display the regions and made the period selector actually work. This is the second iteration as of now:

This has been 3/4 a semester’s worth of work. While there are still lots of little things that I need to implement in order to get the site ready to release one of them stands above the others: URL path functionality. In short, whenever a user selects a currency they should be able to copy the URL, send it to someone and have the site load on the same currency again. This might sound simple but there’s a lot of things that need to happen in order for it to work, especially on a site with no backend (doesn’t refresh).

I am honestly really proud of how far this project has come. Mostly, I’m proud that I’ve managed to bring it this way with minimal help from Stacy or anyone else in the LAITS team. I feel like this is a proof of how far I’ve come as a frontend developer. The project is a nice way to close my time as an STA (since I graduate this semester). I’ll post an update sometime later.

Project: Ancient Currencies
Client /Prof:  Adam T Rabinowitz and Giuseppe C Castellano
Completion status: Started January 13th 2020
Staff guidance: Stacy Vlasits
STA team members:
Description/plans: Create a working prototype for a currency converter between coins of ancient civilizations
To be completed: A couple of weeks

WordPress Maintenance Finished!

I’m writing this on my first shift after Christmas break. (First post of the decade!)

Before talking about what I’ll be doing this coming semester I wanted to post about the WPM project one more time. I spent all my shifts before leaving for the break working on the documentation and finishing up some small issues. Basically, making the project ready for whoever takes over in the future. I honestly think the Github repo looks great, it has a lot of information that I wish I knew before I started this project. I also closed all the technical and documentation issues, only 4 ‘enhancements’ need to be done.

 

Updates on WP Maintenance

I should’ve posted about this before but I actually finished all the maintenance scripts a few weeks back. We now have scripts to add users, remove users, create a new site, update plugins, and update WordPress while optionally keeping the old post editor for a better user experience. All of these are working with a backbone script that handles commonalities between them. I met with Stacy about next steps and, since I’ll probably be handing over the project to someone else next semester, he said that the most important thing was to clean up the project and work on good documentation so that the next person can get up and running with it. I’ve been working on that ever since, cleaning up and commenting my code, and writing a nice README file for the project that explains how it works and how to use it. I think it’s a good experience because I’ll probably have to do the same for projects that I make in future jobs, also its a way to familiarize myself with the markdown language for README files. If I manage to finish all of this before the end of the semester, Stacy said I could probably work on some interactivity for the scripts. Here’s some pictures of the files we have and what my README looks like as of now.