Job Match'UH
The Problem
After graduation, most University of Hawaii students strive to get immediately hired by a local company so that they can put their degree to use. For our final project, we were tasked to create a platform that allows University of Hawai’i students to easily find jobs from local companies that are also interested in hiring college students or newly graduated students.
We devised Job Match’UH to help UH students and local companies connect with each other. Students were able to create and edit their accounts with interest tags and filter through companies based on their interests. Companies were also able to create and edit their account with interest tags and filter through students they are interested in hiring. Additionally, companies could post jobs that were viewable to students.
The Process
In the beginning, utilizing the Agile Project Management practice, Issue Driven Project Management (IDPM), worked against us because we considered all of our ideas possible. There were lots of issues made specific to styling and as we encountered aspects we didn’t like, we were able to quickly adjust. As time went on, it became more difficult to move on from front-end related issues because we still had ideas we wanted to implement or improve. In hindsight, we set an overwhelming amount of functions for our app to accomplish before our first and second milestones and we worked on the “easiest” issues longer than we should have.
Towards the end of milestone 2, there was a distinct preference between members that preferred coding for the front end and those that preferred working on back-end code. Since we were using IDPM, I had to be flexible and work on a little bit of everything, but I did more back-end code. I contributed to the behavior of the app by making the profile cards for the View My Matches page, routing the cards to a profile page, connecting the forms to their collections, implementing the interest filter, and displaying the profile data on the My Profile page. For styling, I worked on the layout of profile pages, sorted the data in alphabetical order, and other small details that would improve the UI.
The Results
Job Match UH was deployed and I believe our group was very proud of our website! This was my first experience using IDPM and I learned a lot about React and how to organize issues by difficulty and priority. The most important lesson I learned was how to work as a team. In the beginning, I expected each of us to solve a piece of the app on our own and when we would bring it all together, everything would work perfectly. In reality, no one worked on an issue by themselves. More often than not, one issue impacted several other issues, and constantly had to communicate our progress with each other. Every issue was a team effort and asking for help was very prevalent and necessary. Personally, Eda Cadiena was my go-to person to help debug my work when I was at my wits end.
This project is very fulfilling because it utilized all of the skills we learned from the semester and I am more confident in starting my own projects.