Zeal is a web app that aims to help event organizers and participants easily discover, create, and join events.
In Fall 2021 at UB, I took CSE 442: a course focused on common concepts and practices in software engineering.
In the first week, we were assigned to complete a full-stack web app as a team of five by the end of the semester. We were also assigned a student project manager that would guide us using Agile common practices including sprints, scrums, and user story and task management through Kanban boards.
Our team founder wanted to create a web app that helped students and hackathons find teammates and relevant resources. Users would type out what they were looking for, then OpenAI would analyze and return the best matches.
For the tech stack, we chose to use React + React Bootstrap for the front end and Django + Django REST Framework + Postgres for the back end since our team wanted to learn React and had experience with Python + Flask.
The web app was to be deployed on Heroku as required by the class.
Throughout the four sprints of the project (each sprint occurred every two weeks) I was involved with a variety of tasks and responsibilities including:
We also made an end-of-semester class presentation that introduced our project in 10 minutes from a marketing perspective (i.e., pretend we were presenting to potential investors, so no developer terms).
In the end, Zeal was quite scaled from the original plan down due to us recognizing that the work and scope would be far too large for a class project. The AI part was a cool idea but excessive and unpredictable.
Despite this, we were able to achieve the highest possible grade while finishing 2 weeks before the deadline. This was a result of the excellent cooperation and skills within our team and my (impromptu) leadership.