Mentor Matching Machine (Chapter02)

Greetings I am proud to be part of a professional team called

this team is composed by:

David Arias(Back-End), Deyber Casta?eda(Back-End), Valentina Jaramillo(Full-Stack) Marcos Pimienta(Full-Stack)

For the past month we have been working with:

which is an accelerator that has helped over 1900 startup companies all over the world, through their mentorship program they help companies get resources to grow exponentially as fast as possible.

The Problem:

It happens that during the mentorship process techstars are having an efficiency problem, it is taking their staff TOO MUCH time to schedule meetings between mentors and companies, they have to manually write in a spread shit in Google forms or Microsoft Excel, then analyze the survey answers submitted by the mentors and companies to find the RIGHT MATCH.

The Solution:

Allow me to introduce you to the Mentor Matching Machine (M.M.M).

A beautiful SPA that allows:

• Automatic Survey Sending

• Survey Matching Algorithm

• Survey Status Management

Technologies Implemented:

For us to create this platform we had to implement multiple technologies such as:

• Express JS and Node JS to build the API
• React and CSS to build the web application and its views
• Heroku for the deployment

Challenges:

I would say that the biggest challenge during this project was coordinating resources, especially on how the data was going to be delivered. I had to change more than 3 times the way the survey view was pulling the data from the endpoints, adding into the equation the other team which name is Purple Code, who were working on the scheduling project, both projects work hand in hand with each other, without a schedule, there is no survey to be filled out, without survey there are no results to be displayed or analyzed, so we needed to have clear communication with Purple Code, fortunately the other team were AMAZING, Ana Ruth Morales and Sebastian Orozco worked in the same meeting room as us, so if we needed anything, they were there for us.

The second struggle had to be with my knowledge of React, I had to learn on the go everything, so it was fun and time consuming, I had to read a lot of documentation, and I am still reading, so I feel some pride to have implemented something of which I haven't touched before.

Back and forth with the UX/UI design, I wanted to present something different and practical, but it turned out that Techstars staff wanted to make the UX/UI as simple as possible, so my first ideas went back to the drawing table a couple of times.

Our Mentors:

I got no complaint whatsoever when it comes to the guidance from the Techstars team, which were Camilo Andres Morales, Heimer Rojas, and Andres Barreto, all of them were eager to help us in anything we needed, Camilo and Heimer where Holberton students as well, so they knew what is like to lack leadership and guidance in a project, they were eager to help us in anything we needed.

I have to confess that when it comes to Andres Barreto, there is this subtle pressure to “show off” in front of the big boss from Techstars, it is this burden to accomplish your task on time since there is this guy who has more success than you, and thinks that you will not fail with the given task, don't take me wrong, he never said anything negative to anyone, on the contrary, he wanted you to learn new technologies as much as you can and as fast as you can as well.

Considerations:

The only thing I want to point out is that I wanted to work a little bit more with the back-end, I feel that I need to learn more about it, and I missed the chance to work on it directly, other than that, I feel accomplished and excited to take on newer and bigger challenges.

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