Mentor Matching Machine (Chapter01)

I have been learning software development in Holberton School Medellín for the past year, as the final project of the "Foundations Program" your team must build a solution that solves a real life situation, this team ranges from three to five members, and you have 3 options to pick:

1. Independent Project
2. Holberton Project
3. Company Project

At the beggining of the last trimester in this educational program, I had the idea to develop an independent project, so the first person that I talked to was Valentina Jaramillo, a kind hearted genius of front-end development, I exposed my project idea which she liked, and we both agreed that for this project to become a reality we needed stronger people in back-end, so the next person we talked to was David Arias, our current TA(Technical Advisor) from Cohort12 Medellín, personally I was skeptical that he will join us, because he is really good in what he does and busy as well, so I told Valentina that we should have a "second option" as good as David, so we reached out to Deyber Casta?eda A.K.A "Master Deyber", when I asked him about the final project he rejected me, because he already had a project in mind with a "friend", it happened that this friend of his, was David Arias!!! We listened to the ambitious projects that each one of us had in mind, and we decided to listen to the companies first, before diving into any project.

The "Job" application

After the companies exposed their project, we had to apply as if it was a job application, but not as an individual, but as a group, which led me to a new experience, even though I am proud of my teammates, I have seen that some of my teammates lack a lil bit of self-confidence, they seem not realize their capabilities, because some of them are new to the I.T industry, so we had to answer some basic questions on a document, one of those questions that I remember: What was an impressive thing you have done?

That kept us thinking a little bit, because we wanted to give an interesting and technical related answer, so some of my peers where trying hard to come up with something really cool and tech related, to which I asked them to tell me more about their life before coming to Holberton, some achievements accomplished, or something that they feel really proud about, thats when I discovered that even though they are genious and have more technical knowledge, they have issues finding value in what they have accomplished, I got inspired by their story, and ask them to put that as an answer, not trying to prove that they are some kind of hotshot, in my young and naive experience I have seen that what is really important and special, normally comes disguised in simplicity and kindness, so creating and leading a math study group in a public university, or taking care of children in a foreign country with a foreign language for me is equally impressive as raising capital for any tech project.

Approved

It was shocking and exciting to get the news that we where selected by Techstars, I was hoping to get involved with an environment that helps start-ups, I dream to have my own start-up company in the future, so now you can imagine why I was pushing it that hard, once we got selected we had to meet our mentors and the company project in a deeper level.

The Project and it's leadership

The project we where selected for was called by us the "Mentor Matching Machine" this project consists of matching startup companies and mentors after their first meeting, so their first meeting was aranged by Techstars staff, which needs a written answer from a survey given to the startup companies and mentors, to see if there was "match" for a second meeting to happen, plus some text feedback.

At the beggining we where given a descriptive document for the project, but the document left us with more questions than answers, so the leading team from Techstars had their first meeting with us, we spoke with Andres Barreto, Camilo Morales, and Heimer Rojas, our first task was to understand the problem, I know for a fact that technical leads can not stress enough about this, because we humans are reactive by instinct, so as soon as a problem is given, most of software engineers will start to code right away, so our first task was to UNDERSTAND completely what was asked from us, so we figured out that we needed an imput from the other team selected by Techstars for another project that had to do with scheduling the meetings, this other team called "Code Makers" consisted of Ana Ruth Morales, and Sebastián Orozco.

Planning & Architecture

So we broke down the requirements in wider steps:

1. Get the data from the scheduling team.
2. Figure out which meetings have taken place.
3. Get the data from the survey between mentors and companies.
4. Break it down on a data table for the Techstars Program Manager.
5. Based on the survey results automate the second meeting scheduling through a "stack ranking" algorithm.

At first sight we knew that this was going to be a web application, so we proposed this to be a SPA(Single Page Application) so it enables and disables components without any redirection, we wanted the front-end to be made with Bootstrap, because I have worked before with it, but I got encouraged by the Techstar team to learn other framework more "compatible" with React.