Accomplishments over Spring break

Over Spring break, the main focus of development was on getting as much of the back end built as possible, at least for me. My main focus was on allowing users to enter data into a form that  contains fields dependent on equations defined by an administrator. The focus was on this mainly because most of the overall functionality we are suppose to be delivering for the final demonstration hinges on us being able to receive and store user input persistently so that it can be user for things like gamification features and awards as well as the dynamic charting.

This was no easy task for me as I was and still am learning Ruby and Rails, so some of the conventions have only just started to set in after having fixed some of the bugs encountered in this process. The main challenge was getting formatted parameters to the server from a user. There are still some input validation issues that need to be address all of the calculation functionality is now working the way it should. Another issue Justine and I ran into while trying to integrate the dynamic charting in with the user statistics was attempting to do math on equations that no longer existed. Our database was polluted and so debugging that took a couple hours. Part of the problem was that it only occurred in the deployment environment and so we had to go sifting through the log file to figure out exactly what was going on.

Fortunately, we were able to get these issues resolved. Because of this, the more fun features we have proposed like awards and ranking will now be fairly easy to implement. We did take a bit of a hit in terms of the user experience as was ABUNDANTLY pointed out in the client meeting this week (which will be another blog post in its own right.)

On the plus side, we will now be free to focus almost exclusively on user experience so I am confident we will have something worth our efforts by the final demonstration.