FB APP ASS-IGNMENT

Last thursday night was too stressful to me. The deadline drawn very near already but our application was still full of bugs. We redesigned the UI that afternoon and have to make some change in the styling. Dilip and I tried to fix some bugs, implement something we hadn't implemented. Tomithy tried to convert his flash to video to publish in Youtube but failed. Later Tomithy and Dilip had to do documentation also. Everything was pretty crazy! I'm sure some times I was very irritating and not responsive. (Sorry to Dilip and Tomithy!) After all, we managed to pull out something run-able and submit. Oh yeah and that tarball requirement =.= It wasn't the end yet. Later that night, after come back from supper with others, I managed to fix some more bugs in the UI part, went to sleep at 5 and skipped all the lectures on Friday.

Assignment 1 passed, had it? We just managed to finish an usable version of our application by the deadline, so there wasn't any use of the AGILE approach. I suspect the deadline is actually a milestone that was given so that we could pull ourselves and release something and after that make use of the feedback from community (just as the first deadline to ensure we didn't start late). Now there is no deadline we have to face, but I don't think the assignment has been over yet; for if we believe in our application, we should continue develop it no matter what.

Personally I believe our application, Heartspoken, can do something different. The idea is to store your good memories, to say thank to your beloved people, to be thankful toward life. I myself observed and experienced the delight a thankful message can mean to another person. Our app was meant to be something useful, not useless-but-popular like many trashy apps in Facebook now. In a social network like facebook, our app can be even more meaningful.

However, it is a difficult application to develop. Not that it requires some fancy new and advanced technology, but that it is hard to sell. It is hard make people appreciate the idea and use it that way. Without knowing about that purpose, the application will be no different from facebook status or twitter. So far we haven't been successful in doing that. 2 weeks for 3-4 people are too short to make something meaningful out of that idea.

Speak of difficulties, our group had no designer, so Tomithy had to do designing. One night Tomithy spent around 6-7 hours started learning Photoshop and did designing. I knew how difficult it was for him to do all that stuff, that at the end he said he couldn't stand designing anymore. Till now I think he still prefer using Flash to design. For me, I was new to web programming so I had to learn mostly everything from PHP, javascript, FB API and stuff. Once I even wrote PHP code inside a script tag.. amidst of javascript code (like, using $ before variable..). Dilip was in charge of database interface but he was even a stranger to programming, he also had to suffer a lot. I'm sure he will never forget global variable stuff in PHP and how we wasted so much time debugging it. We were all learners. We all suffered.

Still, I must say our way of deployment was the best approach and most suitable for everyone. Everyone was specialized in something, work with each other through abstraction layers: like I only have to know which functions I need to call to get and store data, only need UI design to implement UI. Tomithy can based on functionality described before to design UI and intro video. Even if the result wasn't satisfying, at least we gave all we had.

Speak of feeling, I have came through quite different feeling throughout the project. From enjoyment (as described in previous entries) to hopelessness (failed to complete quite many functionalities described) and stress out. Even anything happened, I still enjoyed the companion of my friends. That alone mean a lot to me already. I liked the night spending with them in COM1, eating, working and chit-chatting. The fact that they were there was something to me already. Thanks, Tomithy, Dilip. And Kah Hong, Cedric and all other 3216s who spent nights with us in COM1.

But I did feel helpless. I did felt impotent. 2 weeks I had tried so hard, 2 week I given myself, yet I had achieved so little. Sometimes I felt lost, I felt that what I did was at the end all meaningless. That was the worst feeling.  However, I was happy that I had never stopped trying. Even in the worst moment I still tried to gather all my strength and concentration to work. I was strong.

If there is something we could have done differently, I would suggest myself to throw away AJAX and help Dilip debugging the database functions more actively, and after that focus on basic functionalies.. I would suggest Tomithy to concentrate more on selling our idea and educating users. As we didn't have a designer, we should better give up designing and decided upon something simple but user friendly in a very early stage. We should also talk less about functionality (as these meetings had no end), started deploying the most fundamental one the earliest possible. Not only it would help testing, it would help easing the pressure we had to face at the end.

There are still a lot of thought in my mind, but I should end here. It is a long article already. Hopefully no one will give up reading the whole thing. End with a comic I published drawed the next day after the deadline:

A funny story on Thursday night: On 1 side of me, Tomithy moaning 'I want to do programming', on another side Dilip complain 'I hate programming'. Quite amusing, haha.