Account-A-Buddy

Account-A-Buddy was created to help individuals meet their goals. Users can create an account and start creating goals with any number of sub-goals. For each goal users can record a "Daily Reaction" to help them track and understand how they are feeling about their goal or their progress. The most important feature of Account-A-Buddy is the live chat. Users get matched with another user based on goal categories, and a user can have a different partner for each goal they create. The idea is for the users to keep each other accountable for each other's goal and to talk about them with each other. Once matched users can chat with their accountability partner live! At any time users can also unmatch with a partner and match with another user.

I worked in a team of four to create this original web application. I was the team lead and also worked primarily on the live chat functionality. We used React/Redux for the frontend, Node Express for the backend and MongoDB for the database. Other technologies we used included Axios for making frontend requests to the server, Mongoose for the ORM framework, SocketIO for the live chat.

This project presented several new challenges to me from which I learned leadership and communication skills in addition to coding skills. It was my first time working on a fullstack group project and as the team lead I found it a challenge to negotiate design decisions with the group. Every team member brings their own set of experiences, preferences and ideas which I wanted to tap into to create a great project; however the fully democratic approach became extremely time consuming and prevented us from accomplishing more in the set time we were given. I gained valuable experience being able to delegate tasks and make decisions for the project. As the team lead I oversaw the full development and made sure the team was building a cohesive product as team members were working on their separate tasks. In the end we built something we were all proud of and had fun coding together.