Review: Shopback

This week we have a seminar about growing business in digital market. The class was divided into 10 groups and each one presented about an application. I'm assigned to give critiques about Shopback. Below is what I learn from the presentation from group 1 following with my opinion.

Shopback is the first South-east Asian cashback company. Starting at Singapore, even though the idea is not new, Shopback is the pioneer in this field locally. Its revenue mainly comes from the merchants when they reward Shopback for its advertisement with the deals on its website. By this way, both users and sellers can gain benefit. To be successful on creating the connection between clients and retailer, it should have a very big user base. The UI/UX of the website is one of the most important factor to decide its popularity, so Shopback put great effort to achieve that by providing browser add-on which help eliminate disturbing redirect.

However, there are still many obvious drawback in its UI. The dual language shown in some retailer description can confuse clients, make them think that they are mistakenly addressing local site or getting translation failure. As group 1 suggestion, it is better to separate the site with different language, so the website representation can be disjoint correspondingly.

Another big mistake in the UI is that some description and action are too verbose that can dim the importance of main function. The example given in the seminar is about the crucial shopback link lost in the wall of text. It not only reduces user comfort but also lower . To fix that, shopback should pay more attention to UI and UX and bring critical thing more intuitive.

In my opinion, even Shopback is unique and new locally, I don't see the great potential in it. Having released for 2 years, it still haven't acquired sufficient popularity in the community (I haven't heard that before the seminar also). As a result, It is not big and reputable enough to gain adequate trust from sellers. Moreover, because I find that the UI is not so impressive and eyes catching, I'm not attracted to use it and so do many people. In conclusion, I think Shopback needs much more effort to become successful.

[CS3216] Third week

Things are getting more intense. First time I have to deal with overlap assignments for the same module. Assignment 2 is about learning from famous application. After review from CS3216 committee, we were assigned Paper and Pencil from 53. On the way evaluating Paper and Pencil, we achieved a lot of interesting knowledge from Paper and Pencil such as design, technology and business , we successfully delivered a considerably good slide to submit for the first milestone of assignment 2.

For assignment 1, after creating a stable codebase, things were getting better. The work in team are perfectly shared and we kept the same pace with each other. I am very happy that features were delivered continuously fast. However, we encountered some problems that blocked us for a while such as Facebook Graph API. Due to some recent changes, we can no longer get the full friend list and their photos from Facebook. The next task after Facebook login is choosing the right host for our image management. After some investigation, we decided to move forward with Cloudinary. It is a very impressive image service because It supports all the things we need to handle images work like Image Upload, Cloud Storage, Administration and especially Image Manipulation.  I was responsible for creating api to deal with image and in the third week, I completed API for uploading image and getting image list.

I hope we can continue this great work till the end the first assignment.

[CS3216] Week 2 of the first assignment

After we hada clear picture about our application idea, we discussed on the technology stack for our project.

Because of the familiarity of our team members and the fast development, we chose Node JS, React-Redux, MongoDB stack. This set is also very powerful in term of performance, which makes it becomes hot trend recently. In the mid-assignment submission, we tried to deliver a runnable website with our logo.

At first, we started our project codebase with React Boilerplate. The template is very great when it offers robust and customizable front end. However, when we deployed it to Amazon Web Server, our web application kept failing. We realized that Redux is over complicated that can decrease our efficiency. Due to all the troubles boilerplate bring, we consider not using it in the project and create our own template by configure React/Webpack/Redux from scratch. In the end, the template worked nicely and is also very easy to be deployed on AWS EC2.

The second week has shown me the heavy load of this module with the first deadline. It's so wonderful that we handled all of the issues and successfully met our first requirement. I and our team will try our best to deliver the best product for the next deadlines.

[CS3216] First week of the first assignment

The module got intense just in the first week. Because I was not in Singapore in my first week, I was randomly matched with other fellows for my assignment 1 . My team includes Hiep, Thang, Thien and me. Surprisingly all of my teammates are my well known friends, so I think it will be easier for us to cooperate. We immediately started our project after our team is formed.

In my view, it is a pretty good team. Thien and Hiep are very familiar with React front-end framework while I and Thang gain some experience with back-end. The drawback of full tech team is that we might not have proper design and comfortable user experience. To handle it, we carefully discuss with each other for every upcoming feature so that we can have different perspective and find the best way to make our users enjoyable.

Our first task was to think about what application we should build for assignment 1. After coming up with many creative and unique ideas, carefully considering the feasibility and usefulness of each one, we all agree on photo joining application. The concept is about combining 2 photos, one from the user and one from his friend, into a special photo that can be later shared on Facebook. This idea will very interesting because of its sociability and doesn't require much work to be delivered.

What I hope to learn in CS3216

CS 3216 is a very renowned module in SoC faculty because of its high applicability and challenge. From this module, I expect to achieve:

1) Entrepreneurial knowledge:
This module is a very special when its main target is for developing a useful real life application. The diversity of students varying from Computer Science, Engineer to Business and Science majors helps increase the creativity and applicability of the products. Besides, students can learn from each other, so they can update their knowledge in non-tech fields. It is significantly helpful when we start our own business.

2) Improve my technical skill:
I have been interested in web application for a very long time. Even I had some internships with backend work before, I did not have deep insights in end to end web development because the codebase is always already existed inside the companies. As a result, my job scope is always limited and I did not gain enough exposure about web application. Taking this module will fully equip my fundamental understanding and help me form a good team to start a promising web project.

3) Challenges:
Beside the super excitement this module offers, rumour from many previous CS3216 batches also tells that it is super heavy. It challenges students and put them to limit, so they will work extremely hard to catch up with continuous deadlines. Therefore it will teach us to learn and do things faster, get used to pressure, adapt to the stressful real life work.

In conclusion, even this module is very hard, I find it really valuable for my future career. I believe that I will have a memorable experience in the upcoming CS3216 journey.