Self Critique:
We did a good job choosing a topic and getting it approved early, so we could start planning out our website. It can be difficult to find a time when everyone in a group can meet up, especially in such a large group, but we tried our best to find times when we could meet up to work on the project. If anyone couldn't make it, we were very understanding, because things happen and not everyone can always meet up at the same time. We used Slack and Facebook to communicate with each other when we weren't all together in the lab, and this allowed us to share any updates any of us had on the project. For the more technical parts of the project, we used Slack to share any new things we found out that we thought might be useful for everyone on the team to know.
This project required a lot of tools, most of which were new to us, so we had to figure out how to use those tools. We installed Flask and had to figure out how to get it to work with React. We learned more about Flask by watching tutorials on how to use Flask with Python. None of us had ever used Postman before this project, so we had to learn how to use that as well in order to test out API calls when we were scraping data from other websites, as well as to document our own API. We learned a lot about APIs by looking at those of other websites and seeing what their documentation looked like. Getting the website connected to Amazon Web Services was a bit of a struggle at first, and we had to view tutorials on how to get it to work. Some of us had experience with front end development including using Bootstrap and CSS, so we just had to brush up on those skills and figure out how to build the different pages of the website.
We can probably do a better job planning out what time we want to meet by making plans earlier, instead of on the day of. This way we could be a bit more prepared before we meet up together. We should probably start earlier on the next project too, so we don't feel rushed near the deadline. This would also give us more time to learn how to use new tools and if we need help, we'll have time to ask the TAs or other groups.