The One with the Dashboard Idea

Posted on 3 mins read

My practice project for my learning program will be a dashboard. It is something that will be valuable to the company but there is no need for it to be done in a specific time frame and I am not reliant on outside input. That doesn’t mean I am not talking to anyone about this, but I will be able to work on this in my own time without having to wait for someone who might have more important things on their plate right now.

Today, we talked a bit more about the overall idea of the dashboard. The main goal of this practice project is to learn how to plan and build a software product, with a focus on the software design and architecture part and on trying out tools and techniques we use in the products we build in our teams. A secondary goal is that Studitemps employees can view KPIs that can help them make important decisions.

This means that I have already made some decisions for functional and non-functional requirements: 1. I want to have different sources of input so I can learn how to implement them: - users can manually add data (for example a happiness index gathered in a retrospective) - events from applications we are working on - API Calls to internal applications - API Calls to external applications 2. Users should be able to configure their personal dashboard (so it is not just data input and output) 3. I want to focus my learning on the backend engineering part, not on the operations or frontend part - I will be using the same or similar infrastructure as my team is using for our apps right now. This will not be the best choice for such a kind of app, but that’s okay. - I will try to use a dashboard theme for bootstrap. I will still learn some CSS and JS while doing this and that’s enough.

Things I don’t know much about

  • Project management/planning. My next task is to write epics for the project. And although I have quite a bit in my head already and a lot already written out, this task feels incredibly daunting to me. I have a lot of trouble trying to wrap my head around such a big project (and I feel stupid for writing this seeing as this is such a tiny, tiny project).
  • Jekyll. Again. I tried to change some CSS for this blog because it feels too crowded like it is right now. Nope. I added a task for this week, so maybe I can do better if I “have” to do it?