Discord was the platform the used the most to communicate about the development of allmende. It was the place where we were in constant exchange not only with the team but also with our supervisor David Müller. We took advantage of many useful tools that discord can offer like the creation of threads to discuss features or the up or down-voting of messages to decide whether a feature should be integrated or not. These tools in combination with multiple text and voice channels that even allow live screen sharing made discord a good project management platform for us.
Zoom
In Addition to discord we also used the video conference platform Zoom for our weekly meeting every Monday and also sometimes during the week for group session. Usually this would have been possible on discord as well but some team members preferred Zoom.
Development
Notion
We worked with the Notion board, to overview our tasks and to collect our documentations of our working process. Notion can be used like trello as an srum board. You can create Workspaces, documentations, tasks and a lot morre.
Visual Studio Code / IntelliJ
The majority of team members used Visual Studio Code as their text editor because it offers the best compatibility when working with libraries like React and because it is in general a very powerful editor for web development. The rest preferred working with JetBrain’s IntelliJ.
React
React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. For many of us it was a first experience of developing with React, therefore at the beginning we had some struggles with understanding the syntax and structure of it. Luckily React has a great documentation and a lot of Youtube tutorials (we all’ve been there…) and therefore can be learned in a short period of time.
GitHub
For the version control system we decided to use GitHub, because all of us was already familiar with it and it is very easy to use. The desktop application allows you to maintain your project easily without the need to deal with command line.
Docker
We used Docker to run our Backend. With containerization of our application platform, we could abstract away differences in operating system distributions and underlying infrastructure. In this way we coul easily connect to our backend and work with our frontend.
Postman and Swagger
Another tool we used was the API Platform Postman. We used Postman a lot for testing features that rely on data from the backend because it really helped understanding how the data flows at every step of the app lifecycle.
