Prior to the Hawaii Anual Coding Challenge, I formed a team with 5 other students in my software engineering class at UH Manoa in hopes of competing. After the initial day of presentations, we chose the waste audit category to enter together. Another classmate and myself were put in charge of creating the backend architecture for our would be app, which involved creating a large system of collections all linked to one another through a larger wrapper class and contained generalized functions which could be easily understood by the front end team, so all the data could be efficiently displayed. To get a better idea of what the end product looked like, click here. Our team was one of 20 chosen to present at the final day of judging, and we ended up coming in at 8th place. We might not have received any awards, but to be chosen to present in the first place was a pleasant surprise, and I don’t regret a second of the work put in.
Up until this point, I had never looked at anything in web application creation besides many aspects of front end design, so developing the back end was an exciting learning curve. It greatly expanded my knowledge of how what one sees on the front page of a website actually gets displayed, and where that information is coming from.