I managed to simultaneously work on two full-stack projects my second semester of freshman year. Because of my intense workload and struggles of taking on such big responsibilities, the projects turned out far from perfect. These experiences were extremely valuable to me, however.
ACM Projects at UTD
I worked on a studying web app named Summer. It mainly generated summaries and quizzes from educational YouTube videos. I was responsible for doing the backend by writing a script utilizing YouTube-dl and the OpenAI API through NodeJS. We stored the metadata in Firebase and AWS S3, and displayed the information in designated web pages. The project was showcased in front of hundreds and livestreamed on YouTube
EPICS
My group was tasked to create an administrative web app for UTDesign’s Tool Crib, which is a room at the SPN center where you can check out and use hardware tools. I initially proposed to use a MERN stack for this. I still believe I was overthinking it and we should have gone with a simpler solution for the UI, but we managed to push through thanks to our project manager. We used janky Figma designs to plan this out. I decided to take the responsibility for the backend, and implemented REST APIs in conjunction with relational databases using NodeJS and MySQL. This approach helped keep track of tool counts, increment or decrement them, and retrieve their data. My fellow groupmate also helped me created a way for the admins to download logs of all the transaction data to review and keep track of everything. As Document Manager, I was also responsible to make sure everybody documents their goals/achievements throughout each week using PIG report format. Overall, I clocked in about 65 hours to the project, and showcased it to various companies at the end of the semester. The project was continued later on and made public on GitHub.