Well week 8 has come and gone and they lovingly referred to this week as agency week. The design class from the Austin campus shared some designs with us for a mobile app that they had worked on for us to bring it to life. My first thought when looking at the designs was that I could definitely knock out some of them but I wanted to pick one that would challenge what I had learned so far. And challenge me it did.

I picked a design that had some UI elements that I had not tacked yet and wanted to see what I could do. Having four days to complete the assignment was going to be tough but I was ready for it. I was ready until I started digging in. We had recently covered Firebase for a backend and I chose to go with that for this app so that I could learn a little more about it. Once I started to set up the data model for the app I realized that I may have bitten off more than I could chew.

Being more familiar with relation database models, Firebase was more of a challenge than I had anticipated. It was great for authentication and persisting the user data in the app but I struggled with the other pieces of the app trying to get it connected up. I ended up stressing over the database side of the app than I should have and didn’t leave myself that much time to knock out some of the features that I wanted to get to.

I was able to get some functionality going on a few of the screens, enough to show to our instructor, but I want to keep hacking at it to try and bring it to completion. I also want to thank the Austin class for supplying us with the designs. They were pretty fantastic.

Here are some screenshots of the app so far.