iN5PIRE
18 Dec 2024
Project Overview
This semester, our team which was composed of seven members, were tasked with the challenge of visualizing a financial model given by our customer, Spire Hawaii. Spire is an accounting and advisory service firm located on Hawaii, offering a wide range of service to many different industries. We were given an existing financial accounting model which kept track of all financial records throughout each fiscal year, as well as project and predict what their future finances will look like based on many different variables. This was all done in solely in two excel sheets spreadsheets and our job was to create an interactive website that presented the excel sheet to the user in a more intuitive way, while still keeping all the functionality.
Skills Gained
- React: React was used as our entire frontend of our project, enabling us to build all aspects of the UI. Personally, the biggest takeaway for this class was my improvemment with React. As it becomes more and more industry standard, and for good reason, I believe that honing in my React skills is important for my future as a software engineer
- GitHub: Enabled our team to seamlessly collaborate on code, as well as provide assistance for each other. This semester cemented my skills in fluently navigating GitHub, my team’s repository and all its code, and more confidence and efficiency when working in the terminal
- Meteor: Meteor was used as our full-stack framework, connecting our React elements to our backend database and collections provided by Meteor. Working more with Meteor allowed me to have a much better understanding on MongoDB and generally how frameworks work with databases
- Working with a customer: This is the first instance I’ve had of working with an actual customer and creating a product that follows their requests. From this, I’ve gained lots of experience with trial and error and general problem solving, as not everything we created was accepted by the customer at first glance
Personal Contribution
- Data input sheets: I was in charge of the data input pages and deciphering how they translate to the projections depicted in the excel sheets
- Projection formulas: Each field that had a projection depicted in the graphs has a formula behind it. I was in charge of figuring out these formulas
- Understanding the excel: Because the excel sheets deemed much harder than we originally thought, I spent lots of time parsing the excel sheet and understanding how everything talks to each other
Biggest Challenge
Working with an unfamiliar company
The biggest challenge for me was working with a company of which I had no knowledge of. Accounting is something I’m not familiar with and I found myself spending majority of my time trying to fluently understand the excel sheets. At first glance, the excel sheet was extremely intimidating and translating everything to code becomes much harder when you struggle to understand the source material. In the workforce, I’m aware that this is common, and in order to become a software engineer, I have to be ready and able to navigate through unfamiliar territory. But because of these challenges, I can easily say I am much more confident in my general knowledge of accounting as well as the job of a software engineer as a whole
Lessons Learned
This course gave me a glimpse of what being an actual software engineer is like. We were given a customer with requests and we had to fill those requests. It was the most accurate display of what a real world job situation would resemble, and I feel that having this experience has already made me into a more confident software engineer.