/gradual.ly

Primary LanguageJavaScript

Welcome to gradual.ly!

Home page

Description

It's easier to answer questions like, "has anyone heard back yet?" as a prospective undergraduate student when many of your friends are going through the same process. The same isn't said so much when applying to graduate programs.

Gradual.ly is a platform geared towards prospective graduate students to share updates and stay up-to-date during, what is typically, a stressful admissions process.

With gradual.ly, all users are able to a view posts for a school. Authenticated users are able to save schools to their favorites dashboard for easy of use and better organization, receive email and realtime notifications when a post has been added to their favorites, post updates with specific details such as program, semester, status (i.e. accepted, rejected, waitlisted), and view all of their posts.

Technologies Used

The technologies used for writing this application include:

  • NodeJS
  • Express
  • JavaScript
  • jQuery
  • AngularJS
  • MongoDB + Mongoose
  • AJAX
  • Heroku
  • HTML5
  • CSS3
  • Nodemailer
  • Google's Materialize
  • Socket.io
  • U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard API

Getting Started

Major Hurdles

  • The College Scorecard API was limited in that it doesn't provide the option to query a subset of the enormous data it returns, but instead you have to explicity designate each field. Also, most of the data returned is of data type number, which was not very useful for this project.
  • Understanding the MEAN Stack
  • Materialize conflicting with AngularJS (dropdown)

Unsolved Issues

  • Lag on logging in and out

Next Steps

  • Realtime chat
  • Commenting and liking posts