Recent Posts

• October 20, 2021

  My Favorite

  This past week was a small but needed break from school. Fall break!! I finished up the implementation of test ads into the app which was pushed. It is time to use real ads for the app even in beta testing so that we can start to get some income. I will have to include the app’s actual application unit ID for the units rather than the test ad unit IDs in order for actual ads to show up. I will also have to make sure that ads will be shown and limit what kind of ads will show up.

• October 13, 2021

  Hey, Have You Heard?

  As Good Vibes continues to make progress on becoming an app used by many, the costs of the upkeep for the server and database will also continue to rise, as slow as it may be. Google has a neat little thing called AdMob, which allows users to implement ads into their apps and gain money from people using the app. Ads only give however many cents, but as the userbase increases and more people use the app, the more the money will accumulate. This past week I was tasked with implementing ads into Good Vibes so we could make a little money and be able to help with the costs of maintaining the app.

• October 06, 2021

  Testing, Testing, 1 2 3

  Good Vibes has been distributed to testers! People outside of Disco Tray Studios are now using the Good Vibes app, which I have been very excited for. With the Firebase Analytics now implemented into the app, we can now see the data that users are creating and utilizing as they traverse the app. It is quite early to do anything with the data and we still do not have many users but once we get more people on board there will be a lot of cool stuff to look at. Don’t worry, we can’t see any user-specific data and everything is anonymous.

• September 29, 2021

  Approaching Operation Good Vibes...

  The past week has been a big learning experience for me, quite literally. I spent the bulk of the time between last week’s meeting and this week’s meeting trying to understand the different parts of Flutter. As it stands, Stateless and Stateful Widgets still somewhat elude me while understanding builds and contexts in apps, especially in a somewhat developed app such as Good Vibes, is incredibly confusing. Thankfully, I have an Andrew Eveld to help me understand the Good Vibes codebase and the workings of Flutter. It works out quite well that I am attempting to learn Flutter by creating a Flutter project of my own as I have a senior Capstone project where I am trying to create an ultimate student organizer app which will use Flutter. Overall, compared to when I first started working on improving Good Vibes and taking on something that was quite intimidating, I am slowly but surely getting a handle on things and becoming acquainted with how the app works.

• September 22, 2021

  Firebase and Digging Deeper into the Codebase

  Learning the Firebase database from Google was fun and exciting for different reasons. Learning new things, especially when it comes to computer science, is always a fun journey that comes with challenges that take discipline and a little bit of thinking to overcome. The Good Vibes app we are working on at Disco Tray Studios uses the Firestore Firebase Database through Google, which allows users to create rules in order to make the database secure. Some examples of security measures include checking if a user is an authorized user, the method in which the users account was created (Facebook, Google, Email, etc.), and whether or not the collection/documents exist in the database. This is my first time working on an application that uses a remote database, so learning the ins and outs of this process is incredibly valuable to me. I am still learning how exactly the users get reads and send writes to the database in Flutter in order to be able to create better and more useful rules that are practical for our database.