Holberton Final Project
I’m happy to tell you that we finish our final project for Holberton School and we made a functional solution for a real problem in Kiwibot. Kiwibot it’s a Colombian start-up who offers delivery solutions with robots.
The Team
We are theProblemSolvers and we mean it. A team made of engineers and musicians, methodology and creativity, knowledge and passion. We had worked as teachers, engineers, delivery guys, door to door sellers, constructions assistants, hoteliers, drivers. We had our fair share of bumpy roads and heavy winds. That’s what made us what we are today. A profound determination to accomplish our goals through hard work and a desire for learning so big that it’ll transform our lives forever
Our team members are Andersen Castañeda, Andres Felipe Escobar, Andrés Jején Tabares, Juan Felipe Rodriguez and myself. Andersen, Andres Escobar and Juan Rodriguez focus in front-end and Andrés Jején and myself focus in the back-end.
The Story
We had the opportunity to choose with which company we wanted to work and we choose Kiwibot because we are passionate about what Kiwibot had made possible and we wanna be part of what Kiwibot represents to us. Kiwibot it’s a Colombian start-up located in US, California. With a completely new product/service Kiwibot has fight with giants and has create his own way in the competitive delivery market.
We meet with Kiwibot representatives and decided to put all our effort and skills to make real and working solution.
The first step is to understand that Kiwibot robots are not fully autonomous yet and the drivers are usually students. Now let me tell you that work hours in the delivery business are really irregular, besides that the students also have very irregular schedules which lead to logistic problems.
Would be great if there was a way to schedule the irregular students with the irregular work hours, and see the entire process in a clear and understandable way and leave behind manual processes.
With this purpose we developed Lobbi!
In lobbi:
- Staff can decide the available work hours
- The drivers can select the hours they want to work
- Everyone can see relevant statistics for them.
We developed this platform from scratch using the MERN Stack. The MERN Stack is widely used in the industry and one the main advantages is that we were able to develop the entire project using JavaScript.
We create a RESTful API with Nodejs and Express who interact with a MongoDB database, and a REACT frontend. The Authentication and Authorization was made with Auth0, the containerization of the project with Docker and the deployment with GCloud (RESTful API) and Firebase (React application)
The challenge
The biggest challenge for this project was MERN itself. At the beginning of the project we as a team start with zero previous knowledge of the MERN Stack. We had tight deadlines and We couldn’t allow ourselves to study the stack and then start the project. Doing while learning can be a little more than challenging and we had to face this as a team. We decided to face this as a team and multiply our knowledge, we split into two fronts of attack, front-end who start to learn React and back-end who start to learn Express, Node, MongoDB.
When each team was comfortable with his knowledge we made interchange of knowledge, teaching our learning each other. This multiply the speed of the entire process. Creating a good teamwork dynamic.
At the end we were really proud of ourselves for the gain knowledge but more importantly, we were proud of the quantity and the quality of the work we made.
Kiwibot representatives were happy with our work and that mean a lot for us. We where working and learning day in and day out with the objective of making a working solution for a real life problem.
The lessons
We learn everything. Technologies, social skills, team working, develop leader capabilities, agile methodologies, project planing and project managing.
Some of the technologies that we learn are React, Redux, Node, Express, MongoDB, Atlas, G Cloud, Firebase.
There is always things to do better and we know we made mistakes, we now that our communication, our planing, our team working could had been better but we know that we did our best and all of this things made us a better persons, better engineers, better humans.
After the project several members of the team find their calling in the software world. Some got in love with React and others with back-end and data bases. We are happy we made this possible.
Project links
- Landing page: https://lobbi.netlify.app/
- GitHub: https://github.com/andresjjn/KIWI-supervisors-platform
About Us
Andrés Felipe Jején Tabares
As a Robotics professional in Marina Orth Foundation, I had the opportunity to coach a team of three girls from Medellín’s comuna 6 that won a Robotics World Championship in Albuquerque, USA.
Andersen Castañeda Cardenas
As a musician, I knew the need for a tool to practice percussion instruments, so I decided to learn how to program video games and mobile applications and created the app that I knew musicians needed.
Andres Felipe Escobar Cardona
I’m an IT and sports lover. As a practitioner of Olympic Weightlifting, I represented the municipality of Bello in 2013 and won the title of departmental sub champion, this was thanks to constant training and discipline.
Juan Felipe Rodriguez
I developed a personal passion for learning something new every day, which allowed me to learn a second language and enter the university of my dreams where I discover my passion for expressing my creativity through web pages.
Manuel Puerta Villa
Being an engineer it’s not just the title or even the greats amounts of knowledge acquire over years of study. It’s about a the desire, the drive, the passion of solving problems. That’s what bring me here today. I am an Engineer.
