How and why I built Attendance Manager
About me
I'm Bharath, an undergraduate student from Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. I'm very passionate about learning new things. I believe that one must not stop learning new things. Only because of this I started with Java and I explored almost all until Node.js. For me, teaching others and learning new things was always fun. I've also learnt Adobe illustrator and I could make a few good logos by myself. I know end to end development.
The problem I wanted to solve
The aim of this project to simplify attendance activities for teachers. It all started with a professor who approached me and asked me to help him by developing an attendance manager for him so that his life would become easy.
That moment I've seen many apps in Playstore, which are just there and don't serve the purpose. Then I decided to make an app that would help teachers and I decided to make it free to show my gratitude towards my teachers!
What is Attendance Manager?
Attendance manager is the one stop solution for all teachers where they can easily take attendance and could easily see the reports of all the students. It's just like constantly monitoring each student. They need not go through all reports to find out how this particular student is performing. Every thing is split here. One can navigate very easily in this app and the best thing is it's great UI. I've never compromised while building its UI. You can have a look at it here
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bk.attendancemanager
Tech stack
I've chosen Firebase for the back-end so that I don't need to have any additional server side script and thus saves money. I've also used Azure blob storage to store versions of the app. A user can simply synchronize his current version of data to the cloud and can restore it when never he logs in to another device. Cool!! Isn't it?
The process of building Attendance Manager
I started with building the UI first and then step by step I implemented each component. It's a memorable journey for me!
Challenges I faced
The biggest challenge is how to create a database for this? This requires so many joins and what worried me most is that with these many joins, the scope of making mistakes also increases. I solved it with building my own No-SQL database for this app. The next challenge is designing icons and logos. For that purpose, I learned Adobe Illustrator by myself and I created the logos according to my taste!
Key learnings
I learned to never give up. There have been situations where I just don't understand why this feature got broken etc. I learned Illustrator, which is really cool.
Tips and advice
What I would like to suggest is that when ever you are trying to do something with x, first clear all the prerequisites of x. Then your journey would be very smooth. It causes so much frustration if you go the other way round.
Final thoughts and next steps
Great learning experience and I would also like to add some more features based on the reviews from users.
