Welcome to Week 9 of the CS 373 Blog.

1. What did you do this past week?

   This week was focused on getting the first phase of the project up and running. The ILDB is officially online! Alpha version is live here. I’m really proud of the progress we made this week and I’m excited for the new features we will be adding with the next iteration.

2. What’s in your way?

   Not too much stands in the way at this point. We’ve got a good plan how to go forward with the next phase.

3. What will you do next week?

   We will continue to work through the project and add new features.

4. Experiences

   Although the current version of ILDB only displays some static content, we did a lot of work making sure everything looks nice, and that the future transition to dynamic data will be smooth. Part of the important work we did was getting ourselves familiarized with all the tools (outlined in the About section of the site). Some of the very useful ones included Bootstrap, a framework for frontend development. I found this to be a great framework to use when getting one’s hands dirty with HTML and CSS. Everything was well documented and the Bootstrap site contains many clear examples of how to use different elements. This helped us get some really nice interfaces going, and I have to say that our site looks really great!

   Using Flask was also a fairly simple job. At this stage, we are not exactly utilizing it to it’s full capacity, but the transition should again be smooth into a dynamic model due to the fact that everything is hosted via Flask.

5. Tip of the week

   Schedule your group meetings on Google Calendar! This might seem like a no brainer, but it helped us make sure we could all find a time to meet that was recurring each week. This helped us stay focused, and Slack integration helped by giving us automatic meeting reminders.