Intern turned Front-end Dev
Lynn walked into our office one fine day in 2018 requesting an internship. She handed in her CV, we dropped it onto a pile and never got round to it. But then she dropped in again a week later asking us to hire her and she never left. Lynn started with data and moved into front-end programming and web design from there, meanwhile peering over someone’s shoulder every now and then pointing out something they’d been looking for for hours.
Moving to the front by Nakiganda Sekajugo Lynn
Data processing
Having a little background in GIS (Geographical Information Systems), I had an idea on what to do when we received data from our clients. The initial steps involved receiving the data, cleaning it up and adding the right attributes that would be recognized by our database. All this was done using QGIS, a GIS based application that made my work faster and simpler because it is relatively a simple application to use. Data cleaning may sound boring, but you would be surprised what you find when digging around in a pile of GPS points. Think of maize fields supposedly located in the Indian Ocean and the like.
We would then moved on to gathering the datasets that would attach to the clients data, and this was done in Google Earth Engine. This was new to me as I hadn't worked with Python scripts before and they were what we used to be recognized by Google Earth. However I quickly learned how to read and manipulate them to suit all our clients data as I entered it.
Portal Development
Portal development included several talks and design meetings about what we needed the portal to look like, but before this, we had to first come to a conclusion on what we needed in the structure of the portal and how it benefited our clients. This was not an overnight process as it involved several iterations to the design.
We opted to use React over Javascript which we originally used for the first version of the portal and for several other projects before. I had an understanding of Javascript with portal building but React on the other hand, I knew nothing about. I had to quickly learn the basics of React in order to be able to manipulate the front end of the portal and execute the simple but yet functional design that we had agreed upon as a team. This was difficult in the beginning, as learning anything always is in the first tries, but mostly because we were low on time and we needed to deliver the new and improved product to our clients. However, I got the hang of it because React has a fast and simple structure, which is one of the reasons why we chose it over Javascript and it's easier to manipulate, even for beginners.
Adding libraries to React sometimes makes the manipulation a little harder as they're built in Javascript and are more compatible with Vanilla Javascript, and we experienced this with Leaflet which is a web map library that we needed in order to show our client's information.
Design
Designing the portal which is the UI/UX of the application, is by far my favorite part. This is basically the look and feel of the product to those that'll be using it. The design process involved a lot of sit-down meetings and iterations to come up with something that the whole team was comfortable showing off. In doing this, we got to work with another UI/UX designer via Founders Factory Africa, whose ideas were much needed for the improvement of the portal. Her fresh perspective and clean design implementations were added value to us, as she had more experience in the field and it was such an amazing experience to learn new tips and tricks from her on how to approach some of the design problems we had.
We used design mockups to see what we wanted the portal to look like at the end and we went through each design element one by one, implementing it into the web application. Tackling the elements one by one was a more efficient way of handling the design process as it broke the work load into small manageable bits and it was easier to track what was going right and what was going wrong.
I'd definitely say it wasn't easy moving into the software development field but it is worth the time and effort.