Get excited with Storysquad
Working with Storysquad,I was filled with such excitement from being an uncle and someone who struggled with english in school. Working on a product that not only seeks to target kids to get them to read more. Also gets them to practice writing and drawing skills which helps boost the creativity in little kids helping them become stronger problem solvers in their future. Only fear coming in was taking on my first project working with other developers as a team.
The feature my team worked on was the single-player boss mode which allowed the child to play against a bot who would select random writing and drawings to compete against the player.
Digging through the codebase
Aside from providing any help I could to my teammates, I worked on the voting system by doing a bit of design. First step I study up on the code identifying anything that I can reuse to develop the view page. Being the first time working with ant design I did a bit of research on the website. I quickly found it very similar to Bootstrap, so I quickly picked it up. Took a look at the voting page they had set up and pulled code I could reuse over.
As the page came closer to being set up I encountered an issue with the ant design slider function. I replaced the ratio component they were using in squad mode with the slider but it broke the website display and nothing would show up. So after spending about 20–25 minutes trying to debug it I brought the Engineering Manager in to show him what I’ve been trying to do and showed him the documentation I had been working off of. After about 5 minutes of discussing and demoing the issue, he suggested we try the rate component, with the exchange of the components the webpage pulled up in a jiffy.
With the size of the feature it’s not quite up but most of the visuals are up, but the logic for the single player still needs some work. Selecting what gamemode you want, deciding whether you’re going to draw or write.
Future for Storysquad and me
With the goals of bringing more kids into the realms of language arts, this app has so much potential that can be expanded to bring a competitive aspect to education. With Graig Peterson and Darwin Johnson at the helm of this expansion into education. Exploiting the competitive nature of man at an early age will excel learning.
Lots of different challenges especially with the difficulty of the data scientist end. Different handwriting to learn and drawing to scan up would be tons of fun there. With this coming to the end of working on it gave me the experience to go through a legacy codebase and feel a bit more confident doing so.