As the school year begins again, one of our Asso­ciate Devel­op­ers leaves after his time with us for the sum­mer Soft­ware Asso­ciate pro­gram. Rohit Kartha worked on a short-term project with us and learned a lot about real-world devel­op­ment, and the soft­ware con­sul­tan­cy busi­ness mod­el. In this post, Rohit is going to share the lessons he learned dur­ing his time with us. We hope that this can help you, if you’re inter­est­ed in work­ing with us, under­stand what devel­op­ers both do here, and what valu­able lessons they can learn from just a short time on the job.

The Project — Grady’s Gar­den #

Rohit Kartha, Asso­ciate Developer

Grady’s Gar­den is a food and nutri­tion com­pa­ny that focus­es on pro­mot­ing a healthy lifestyle and nutri­tious food choic­es. The project at Michi­gan Soft­ware Labs revolved around cre­at­ing a web-based appli­ca­tion that edu­cat­ed chil­dren about veg­eta­bles in a fun and cre­ative way. The main ele­ments of the appli­ca­tion includ­ed a veg­etable iden­ti­fi­ca­tion quiz, a video play­er designed to show­case an ani­mat­ed video about gar­dens and veg­eta­bles, and fun, edu­ca­tion­al tid­bits to make the appli­ca­tion more enjoyable.

Lessons Learned #

Being new to using Vue3, the frame­work our web-app would be built in, devel­op­ment seemed daunt­ing at first but over time there was much that I learned and picked up on.

Atom­ic Design and Vue

The first large con­cept I learned was how to split up code into reusable ​“chunks” or com­po­nents, which is part of the Atom­ic Design par­a­digm. Next, was under­stand­ing how com­po­nents worked with each oth­er. By grasp­ing Vue ​“props” and Vue ​“emits”, I even­tu­al­ly learned how so-called ​“par­ent” and ​“child” com­po­nents com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er. Through­out this process, con­nect­ing the pages we made required me to learn about the Vue-Router and tools like nest­ed and dynam­ic routes. Last­ly, was the stor­age of infor­ma­tion between all our pages and com­po­nents with Pinia. I learned how to set up a Pinia store and sit­u­a­tions where Pinia state man­age­ment could be use­ful. Sev­er­al oth­er fun­da­men­tal top­ics came up along the way such as com­put­ed prop­er­ties, slots, com­pos­ables and vue transitions. 

Learn­ing about Vue and adding a lot to my pre­vi­ous knowl­edge of Type­Script and CSS real­ly expand­ed my skills as a devel­op­er and opened up sev­er­al poten­tial avenues for future devel­op­ment and creation.

Ana­lyt­ics

To observe if our web appli­ca­tion had a sig­nif­i­cant effect on a child’s will­ing­ness to try or abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy veg­eta­bles, we incor­po­rat­ed Google Tag Man­ag­er, Google Ana­lyt­ics, and Google Look­er Stu­dio. The main goal was to com­pare children’s results in our ​“pre-quiz” sec­tion to our ​“post-quiz” sec­tion and take note of any trends between the two. The Google Tag allowed for the track­ing of events or cer­tain impor­tant user actions. Even­tu­al­ly for every answer a child clicked, data on their choice would be sent and stored on Google Analytics. 

Through the process of work­ing on this task, I was able to learn a great deal about these three tools. More specif­i­cal­ly, I was able to under­stand how to set up an under­ly­ing ana­lyt­ics tool and con­trol what user data is stored.

Pri­va­cy

While think­ing about how ana­lyt­ics would be set up, one top­ic that was brought up was how to store the infor­ma­tion of users, par­tic­u­lar­ly that of chil­dren, in a way that meets pri­va­cy reg­u­la­tion stan­dards. This was insight­ful to hear and allowed me to bet­ter under­stand the con­sid­er­a­tions a team must take before releas­ing a pub­lic application.

Agile

Through­out the sum­mer, I was able to bet­ter famil­iar­ize myself with the Agile method­ol­o­gy and gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how soft­ware is devel­oped in the indus­try. These skills will help in the future as many com­pa­nies uti­lize Jira Scrum Boards or a sim­i­lar sys­tem for their development.

Con­clu­sion #

David Craw­ford, Soft­ware Developer

Rohit did an amaz­ing job work­ing on this project. One behav­ioral les­son that we hope to instill in every­one, and saw Rohit devel­op well over time, is know­ing what the right ques­tions are to ask ear­ly and often. When you don’t have a lot of expe­ri­ence, it can be hard to ask the right ques­tions ear­ly in a project. Through­out the sum­mer, Rohit devel­oped a great under­stand­ing of foun­da­tion­al ques­tions to ask ear­ly for the next project he might work on. These are ques­tions that are com­mon to any project, such as what the ana­lyt­ics needs are or how respon­sive the design needs to be, so that we can make proac­tive deci­sions instead of reactive.

If you like what you read here and want a place to learn and grow in the same ways as Rohit, check out our careers page to find an open­ing that’s right for you.