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Week 22 - #PeakUpForever

This is it. The days flew by real fast. Our blood, sweat, and tears are finally made manifest. What once was just a mere suggestion; a thought that once only lived in our heads was finally here on our computer monitors.

There were only a few things left to do before we could finally do our final presentation. On the day of, we had to create our user manuals— both the flyer and the video. So we couldn't go through that door quite just yet. But after all that we've been through, this was pretty much just the victory lap.

for something of a rushjob, I'm quite proud of how this user manual turned out.

Unfortunately, we couldn't quite finish editing the user manual video before it hit 4 PM, and the first group to present took until 5 PM for their presentation. So although we were ready, our day of reckoning would have to wait until tomorrow. Man, destiny is quite a tease.

Couldn't get into that door just yet.

I actually consider the delay to be a blessing in disguise. Because of that I could actually finish up the user manual video, and we could do some last-minute touch ups to the UI/UX and fix some bugs that have been bugging us for a while. Of course, it wasn't quite perfect, but close enough. Bring it on!

annoying UI bugs

The next day, we got there as soon as possible. Nothing was gonna stop us anymore. This was it. The final battle.

Pictured: Feverishly making sure the system actually worked for the presentation

When we finally presented our system, our fears came true— the system didn't run as well as we'd hoped. Whether it was the backend going coockoo on us, the frontend bugging out, or the internet fighting for its life, anything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Still, against all odds we were able to show that our system did work how it's supposed to, and that it had the features that it needed to have. The panel of instructors didn't have a lot of comments for us, and in the end I think they were satisfied with what we had to show. I couldn't believe it. Actually, I can. Our whole team, from the manuscript, the UI/UX, the frontend, the backend, did their jobs so excellently, and it showed. I feel like I didn't say enough about Rona and Edrian throughout this whole blog, and that is an injustice. Without them, our jobs as coders wouldn't have gone as smoothly as it did. They are the backbone of this team. I cannot say enough how amazing they were at making the paper, conducting the surveys, the interviews, gathering the data, doing the testing, and designing the UI/UX. This victory wouldn't have been possible without them. I am truly lucky to have been a part of this team.

@eyyde-sync-blog @lompia-sysdev-blog @mrkimchi-sysdev-blog @arimdeblog #PeakUpForever

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Week 21 - Crescendo

This week is the final grind week. We're so close to the finish line, it still doesn't feel real. There's really only a few things left to work on until we're good. Between you and me, it doesn't really feel like 100%, really— but if we could just get as close as we physically can to that magic number, I'd be satisfied. Hopefully our instructors will be, too. So we organized one last sleepover. Sadly, Edther couldn't make it, but she still did not sleep alongside us over Discord. Our frontend dev, Loraine also had two of her teeth pulled out just before our sleepover so she had to soldier through constant headaches while we did our final push in the trenches.

taking a break to hunt for ice cream

ice cream secured!

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Week 20 - FINALS

I gotta say, this is the least finals-feeling finals I've taken. Maybe it's because of the headbands, or the fact I'm just sitting around a conference table with my whole team, but I wasn't at all nervous or worried. Our instructors took pictures of us with our headbands on, and of course Sir Carl was amused with what we came up with. Another source of tension relief. But I guess we just all knew that this wasn't the real final— No, the real final was taking place on June 3-4, 2025.

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Week 20 - The Last Consultation

Time came for us to finally have our last consultation. Knowing we really couldn't get to 100% on time before the finals, we instead opted to just have a consultation instead of a straight-up presentation. Still, during the consultation, Sir Carl told us that we were so close, and that we could still finish later on that day if we wanted to. That is, until he found some things the system was lacking that we couldn't just finish in a few hours. So final exams it is. Regardless, after hearing that we were to make (and wear) headbands for finals, the team excitedly headed to the mall to do some shopping and to brainstorm headband ideas.

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Week 19 - Final Interlude

During our 70% presentation, Sir Carl made a deal with us: if you could 100% your system before finals, your group gets to be exempted from SDE finals. I believed we could get there, of course, but other subjects and deadlines just got in the way. Work on the site doesn't stop, however.

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Week 18 - That 70% Show

It's finally that time. Going into class today, I was filled with this excited energy that I usually don't get. Usually on presentations like this, I get quite nervous and anxious, but because I was so proud of my team's work, the only reason I could have been anxious is because I could not wait to show off what we'd been working on. When it was finally our turn, we did the run through of our system— from sign up and log in, to the menu browsing, and the add-to-cart functionality, while also showing what our system still lacked. Suffice it to say, I think Sir Carl was quite satisfied with our work. He only had a few things to say, and a few questions, but all-in-all, we were in the clear! Time to set our sights on 100%!

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Week 17 - On The Way There

With the presentation for the 70% completion of our system fast approaching, much of our week was spent finishing the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of our system.

Which means at least log in, sign up, user profiles for the customers (student/faculty), the vendor, the menu, and the order list, should at the very least be functional.

We've got our work cut out for us. As we got deeper and deeper into our work, however, issues naturally arose. Things like design elements from our Figma designs (sorry Edrian!) being hard to execute in the framework (or the lack thereof) that we're working with, the responsiveness of said designs, the lack of uniformity from one page to the next, were some tough challenges that we had to deal with.

So most of my and Loraine's work was spent trying to fix the frontend, while our Edther worked on the backend. At this point I had no idea what's going on in our backend, but I have full and complete trust in our Backend Engineer. In the end, our site ended up being quite different from our Figma design, but I think we kept faithful to the original design's spirit, while having a functional and responsive system. All in all, I was quite satisfied and confident for the upcoming presentation.

Hero Section: Before

Hero Section: After

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Week 16 - You, yes you.

Our team has been hard at work at the frontend this week. After the login system is functional, we moved on to creating the user profiles. Our talented Loraine, resident frontend developer, cooked up this user profile for us. On the way to 70%, we gotta make sure that our user log in/sign up, and main functionality are up and running by the end of next week. Let's speed things up.

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Week 15 - No, you can't go in there

As with any self-respecting modern system, you gotta have authentication. This week, we're creating the user login system, and making sure that the person knocking at the door is actually who they say they are. I've seen a website before. This will be easy-peasy.

Actually, wow. There's a *lot* of checks you gotta make to make sure your login is airtight. I did not expect that. But that's just how these things go, I guess. I should have expected that.

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Week 14 - A little bit SUS-y

Well this is a fun one. For our activity this week, we calculated System Usability Scores. As the name implies, the SUS is used to evaluate the usability of your system through user responses. It's a handy tool for seeing where you're at with your system. This will come in useful for sure. But for now, we gotta actually *have* a system.

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Week 13 - Exploring CSS

To try and understand what we're doing, I took a stab at trying to recreate our Figma design through coding it myself in CSS — and voilà.

It's a *lot* harder than it looked. I underestimated the amount of work it would take to try and match our Figma design exactly. Nevermind trying to make it responsive— that is, making sure that the UI design stays intact through different screen sizes.

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Week 12 - Turning Back the Clock

With the Figma presentation over and done with, it's time to actually turn our dreams into reality. Step 1: converting the Figma design into css using some dev tools built into Figma. Looking pretty rough, but hey, baby steps.

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Week 11 - D-Day

So it's finally time for our Figma presentation. It's *the* day that we get to have our dear Sir Carl check out what our UI/UX Designer, Edrian cooked up. The tension in the air was palpable. The whole 2nd floor of the CEA building was absolutely flooded with Computer Engineering students sitting on the floor with their laptops out, frantically doing last-minute touch-ups of their systems' Figma designs.

It was an entire day before it was finally our time to present, and I gotta say, I think the presentation went well! Of course, there were some constructive criticisms from our instructors, and we were only too eager to hear them out. We missed some things on designing the UI/UX, but it's nothing that we can't fix. I'm really proud of what our team accomplished today.

UI/UX Presented!

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Week 10 - It's midterms!

It's midterm season, baby! Which means sleepless nights and buckets of coffee. It was also time for our SDE consultation. We had a million things for Sir Carl to check— all for Chapter 3 of our paper, which is turning out to be quite the monster. I think we spent most of the time we had just presenting the diagrams for our system.

We just have a little bit more to change with our systems' diagrams, and it's on to the next thing! Chapter 3 we will conquer you!

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Week 9 - Figma Tutorial

It's been a long time since this blog got updates, but to catch you up, here's week 9 — during this week, we did not meet for SDE, but we had a deadline for our landing page designs that we came up with after the Figma workshop that we had the previous week. BTW, we had a figma workshop at school. As expected, it was a fun jaunt through the world of UI/UX. It was great being in a room full of my batch mates messing around in Figma. We learned about the many different plugins and figures that Figma had. I wish I had more photos from that day, but here's some for posterity.

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Week 8 - Interview with the Vendor

This week, I was still out on Monday and was generally still not feeling too good, so my group had to conduct the interviews for our system without me. Of course it went real well, the only hitch is that we couldn't seem to quite catch the manager of our chosen vendor at a good time. Our schedules just don't align, plus we had a bunch of other school stuff we have to do in the mean time.

nevertheless, we have enough info to go off of and to proceed with polishing our paper. We also have to complete our diagrams and lompia and I have to finish our Advanced Engineering Mathematics PIT that's due on Friday.

This week's pretty darned hectic to say the least.

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Week 7 - Buggin' It

This week I caught a stomach bug that hurt like hell. I was out of commission, but my trusty teammates can do anything without me, so it was all okay. Anyway, this week was UI WEEK!!! I was looking forward to this day for so long. I just love messing around with design elements in software, even though I'm not our UI guy. We started the day off with a very fun minigame called a rebus puzzle— a very PUNny puzzle where you try to figure out what word or phrase is being depicted by a picture or word or both

After that we had a lecture about designing UI/UX and had a short exercise where we were given some example UIs that had missing elements and we had to come up with ways to complete/improve them

Today was as fun as I expected.

[Diagram Creation In Progress]