Initially, the feature I was supposed to work on was the earnings feature which involves a record of the amount of money an expert makes after each question they’ve answered but just when I was about to start working on it I found out I had already done it sometime last year.😁
That being said the feature I worked on next was a system for expert registration and verification. Now this one is interesting because I initially had a very complicated plan but now it’s very simple, let me break it down. So basically what happens is when a potential expert uses the app for the first time they’ll be asked for their login details which is just a simple email and verification code process. Next, before they can access the app they’re taken to a page where they’re supposed to put information about themselves, nothing extreme just stuff like names, ID, contact details, location and most important of all proof of academic excellence because how else are we gonna know if somebody is legit. Once they put in their details my team and I review it and once we see that okay this guy is legit smart we can then approve their Registration request via the Django admin dashboard. Once they’re approved they’re then automatically able to access the app. All this is made possible because of some simple functionality I added to the backend sometime ago. This is done to prevent anybody and everybody from waking up one day and deciding to become a Couse Assist expert even though they don’t have good grades.
So back to the gist of things, the complicated plan I had initially was that I was going to manually create forms in the app, take the user data input and send it to a server that I was also going to create myself. Then view the expert details there and approve them if they’re a good fit but then I had a lightbulb moment💡. Instead of going through the whole process of creating forms and a server I could just create a Google form and add the link to the page experts see before they can access the app. Now some may call this lazy development but I believe in getting things done as soon as possible and deploying the product quickly, especially in the case of Course Assist which has taken me a little over a year now to complete. All of this has significantly reduced my development time and now Course Assist should be complete any week from now. With this crucial piece of functionality added some of the big things left are building a landing page, testing the whole system and last but not least deploying the backend to AWS and the apps to their respective play stores. Thank you for reading and see you next time.