A Little Bit About HRF
Human Rights First Asylum is a non-profit, nonpartisan project my team and I have been working on for the past 4 weeks. This organization works to connect immigration attorneys and advocates with asylum seekers and provides these attorneys with the resources they need to best represent their clients. Our application retrieves data of a judge’s past decisions, in hopes to better inform and tailor the advocates arguments on a specific judge, to improve the chances of their client receiving asylum. During these last few weeks, our team has been working on showcasing the data being displayed in a more user-friendly manner, information being more accessible and adding new features. A new feature that was added was notifications, which I believe will be very helpful in keeping our advocates informed on any new uploaded cases, new users, and new judge reports. My fear coming into this experience was how much of the project was already done, I was nervous there would not be enough things to work on for how many people are in our team. I thought the website looked great, and it wasn’t until our team started collaborating ideas and suggestions that I realized how much more work needed to go into getting this project in a place to be shipped.
Our Teams Features and Challenges
Our team has encountered some technical challenges, one of those being our custom visuals to work properly. Our DS team is currently working on getting the visuals switched to a fast API format, they have the idea of what they want planned out and are working on getting that up and running. Then our back end will need to create end points and the front-end is in progress of creating the forms for this. All parts of our team have been working together endlessly to get these data visualizations up and running.
One of my main contributions on this project was converting the users and pending users page from drop downs, which were in separate sections of the page, into tables that you are now able to tab back and forth between users and pending users. Using drop downs for the users was not displaying the information in the most useful way. The more users added would have made their information run off the page, and more time consuming for the admins to have to drop down every person’s information, and only be able to see one user at a time. Whereas with the tables, you can see a whole page of users and all their information at the same time, clearly laid out. This new design makes the admins experience more user friendly.
Making Strides As A Developer
Our team has made huge strides on features added to this project, and not only appearance features, we have also made the web application work at a much faster pace, and improved load times by a significant amount. The team has added a comment section, notifications, improved login/sign up credentials, added required fields notifications on login/sign up, re-designed the login page, converted users page from drop-downs to a table, added filtering to search through judges and cases with specific information, fixed all buttons to match, resized logo and icons, work on uploading a case.
I believe this app is almost ready to be shipped off and fully functional after some code clean up, and a few bugs to be fixed. Working on this project has made me believe in my abilities as a developer. Looking at the portion of the project that I was supposed to complete, I was very nervous that I would not be able to deliver what they were looking for, I said to my team I would be able to get all the data to be displayed as a table but that I didn’t think I would be able to get the tab feature to click back and forth between users and pending users to work. We used a new design library that I was not familiar with and had never used. It took me a lot of time reading through documentation on the internet and a ton of time combing through the code to piece it all together. It took me quite awhile but I was able to get this feature finished exactly how it was expected to be. I have learned that communicating and collaborating with my team is the most important part of a successful web app. We all have different ideas and outlooks on everything and it’s very helpful to bounce ideas off one another. I think all of us, as a team, have made a huge improvement on this project and I can’t wait to see what the next team adds to this website, and to see the final product!