The Future of CitySpire

Welcome back! In my previous post, “Aspire to Inspire: Designing the CitySpire App”, I discussed what CitySpire was and the wonderful team that put it together. If you haven’t already, you should give it a quick read to better understand what I am about to tell you. You’ll find some cool code snippets and screen shots to give you a visual throughout the post.

What does the future look like for CitySpire?

In order to discuss the future, we must first discuss the present. Currently CitySpire has a pretty rad layout and look about it. There were many different features used in this project.
Features include:

• A carousel of images made using Ant Design’s carousel component

• A link to a Netlify hosted page for trivial facts about US States. This site is incomplete, but the GitHub repo is linked in the ReadMe file in case future developers would like to work with it more.

• A search form that allows the user to search for their desired city

• A “Pin City” feature that allows the user to pin their favorite cities to their user dashboard

• A data feature that populates information about rental prices, crime rate, air quality index, diversity index, population, walkability, and livability

• A recommended cities section that populates a listed of popular, recommended cities in the current search area
• A mapbox that shows a map of the current city and surrounding areas. The mapbox is meant to be in the blue blank area seen in the demos above

Buggin’ out!
As you can tell from the demo videos, some of the features aren’t working quite yet. They were for a bit and then there were some changes that caused them to stop working in the deployed site and only work locally on only the computer of the team member who created them.

It would be awesome to see these bugs worked out and all features working the way they were meant to be. The technical challenges may be some of the same we had, which was making the functions connect back to the DS database properly so that the information continued to populate without being erased or modified with each merge to the main branch.

Feature future
There are many features that could make this project more amazing. It would be great to see:

• A discussion board where users can discuss why they chose specific cities
• A review option where users can post a review and rate the cities based on different things
• An option for users to upload images of their favorite things to do in a particular city
• An events page regarding special events that often occur in the city

There are many features to choose from in Ant Design’s lists of design, docs, and components!

Challenges of the future
I mentioned above that one of the main challenges will be working out the bug kinks we ran into. Since this issue happened mostly between the backend and data science groups, I am not completely sure what caused the issue. I just know that there were many hours spent trying to correct it but it just didn’t want to cooperate.

Feedback from peers
During this project we were asked to submit feedback about each other. I received two feedback submissions.

It’s awesome that you were able to handle an entire section of our project all on your own, I hope to match your level of independence some day. — Jay M.

[Britney] is a creative UI/UX designer. She has a great eye for developing applications that are both visually appealing and intuitive for users. She will be a great asset to any team she is on. — Jisha O

This feedback warms my heart and makes all the hard work well worth it!

Perhaps the best advice anyone has ever given comes from the entire student body and faculty at Lambda, as well as my friends and family. That little piece of advice consists of just three little words:

Don’t give up!

You see, learning to code is a challenge in itself. Imposter syndrome is no joke and it can take over quickly and often. Many of us fight the battle with imposter syndrome at least once a week and have to force ourselves to keep pushing and keep coming to class because once you reach Labs and get endorsed, all that imposter syndrome will be a thing of the past!

CitySpire and My Future
This project was probably one of the most dynamic projects I have had the pleasure to be a part of. It helped me to push the limits of my design and get to do what I really enjoy, which is indeed designing! CitySpire taught me some valuable skills while enhancing others that I already had. It also taught me that learning something new, as frustrating as it can be, has amazing rewards in the end. Because of that, I believe this project will further my career goals, which is to be a Front End Developer with a heavy focus in CSS and design.

Thanks for stopping by and always remember: DON’T GIVE UP!