Xinyi Liu

We decided to go with React for frontend development because one of our members is familiar with it. Since it has a large community of developers and thus great support, the learning curve won’t be that bad for picking it up as a new skill hopefully. Pairing it with Redux makes the application state clear and manageable.

The product our team aims to build is a visualization tool that serves to display data in a more readable, customizable, and user-friendly way. With that being said, the capability to support a large collection of graphs and charts is essential to the success of our product. Recharts is a chart library designed for React and one of our developers has prior experience working with it. Recharts builds on a “modularity” concept which makes it very easy to twist and customize predefined components. Due to our extensive and heavy use of charts, we also need to bring in Nivo. Nivo provides various graphs specialized for analytical purposes that Recharts does not include such as Map, Tree, and Network graphs.

As our team will be building a web application, HTML5 and CSS3 are one of the standardized combinations to implement the structure and the styling of a webpage. Material-UI comes with all sorts of predesigned web components such as buttons and dropdowns that will save us tons of development time. Since it is a component library designed for React, it suits our needs. However, we do acknowledge that predesigned components may sometimes cause pains especially when it comes to custom styling. To make our life even easier, we also adopted Tailwind CSS. It is a CSS framework providing low-level utility classes that will act as building blocks when we create custom designs.

Whenever we encounter technical issues during product development, Stack Overflow is our best friend. Stack Overflow has a vast number of questions that are already answered by qualified experts so there is a high chance that you can find the solution to your problem right away. Even if you start up a new discussion, the average response time is usually within a few hours.

Under the impact of COVID-19, everything is switched online. Since lectures are hosted on Zoom and course-related announcements are posted on Slack, our team continues to use them as tools for internal group meetings and group discussions.