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N@TM Tri 2 Reflection and Learnings #13

Open akshat122805 opened 8 months ago

akshat122805 commented 8 months ago

Main Reflection

Reflecting on the N@TM Tri 2 presentation of our project, PLACE.com, it's clear that we embarked on an ambitious journey to merge the functionalities of Discord and Outlook into a single, innovative platform. Our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) presentation was a crucial milestone, showcasing our initial capabilities such as texting on a channel server, creating a channel server, integrating a customized PLACE.com chatbot, and implementing an image uploader. These features laid the groundwork for a platform that aims to streamline communication and organizational tasks in a novel way.

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The feedback from our audience was invaluable, highlighting the need for a more polished interface and additional features that would enhance the user experience. The call for incorporating Outlook-like features, including an ingrained Calendar, a calendar thermometer, and instant messaging (IM), was helpful. It shows the desire for a more integrated approach to managing communications and schedules, an area where our project could truly innovate.

Adding on, Rachit gave extremely valuable feedback regarding how we can explore different APIs that align with our future feature plan of iframe popups (this is so the user does not leave the tab and the retention rate for PLACE.com is higher).

Me and Orlando particularly struggled to build a fetch interface in the initial stages, and feedback from Theo about how we can use call-to-sort feature could be particularly helpful for instant messaging rather than channel viewing. This is so we can embed the feature of the user being able to retrack and search for previous messages.

Our future plans are ambitious and reflect a commitment to not only address the feedback but also to push the boundaries of what PLACE.com can offer. The intention to include multiple APIs for weather, maps, iframe websites, etc., indicates a move towards a more comprehensive platform that serves a wider range of user needs. By drawing inspiration from Zimbra, a successful integration of email and collaboration tools founded in 2005 by Satish Dharmaraj, we aim to create a more cohesive and versatile experience for our users.

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Learning the concepts of INTP and SMTP will be crucial in achieving our goal of integrating an Outlook/email style with Discord's instant messaging. This technical foundation will enable us to build a more robust and reliable platform that can handle the complexities of modern communication needs. Furthermore, the focus on improving the styling of PLACE.com is a recognition of the importance of user interface design in creating an engaging and intuitive user experience. Our objective for the next iteration is clear: to deliver a platform that excels in both functionality and style.

After meeting one of our classmate's dad, who has worked in the email space, he talked about what we needed to study for INTP and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Me, Orlando, and Mati plan to study this in depth to understand how we can make PLACE more of a combination of discord/slack/outlook rather than just a slack copy.

Reflecting on this phase of the project, it's evident that we have laid a solid foundation but also identified clear areas for growth and improvement. The journey ahead is challenging yet exciting, with the potential to create a truly innovative platform that bridges the gap between communication and organization tools. Our commitment to learning, adapting, and innovating will be key to realizing the full potential of PLACE.com.

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I also went on and explored other areas of this night, and I saw amazing paintings depicting chinese philosophy as well as clay structures of aeroplanes. I like both, philosophy and planes are both very cool in my opinion. Its amazing how Del Norte has fostered an environment of creativity, and its really cool that we get to explore other areas of innovation as well.

In my opinion, computer science has the most innovation, as we have leverage with code to build anything we want, we dont need to spend too much on supplies either, even servers are allocated to AWS and Firebase, all we have to do is just ideate and code.

Looking at these art styles, I hope to one day pursue building art differently with many cool styles like sculpting or ceramics. I think I'm going to also learn video game art, which I find pretty cool. Maybe there will be a class in Del Norte about video game design and animation in the future, and if that class was there, that would be very fun and informative, especially by connecting it to computer science and OOP.

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