SocialCloud – Lessons Learned – Part 8

Looking back at 4 months of intensive work on our project “SocialCloud” we gathered a lot of experiences and learned many things regarding teamwork, cloud infrastructure and about the difficulties of creating and designing a web application from scratch.

Read this blogpost to be prepared for your next big project!

Teamwork

Working in a team is nowadays essential for creating new ideas and realizing projects. The collaboration enables a transfer of knowledge between the different team members, because of their various interests, skills and expertises. Especially in the wide area of computer science it’s a big advantage if your team is covering the different parts needed for realizing your project, like specialists for database development, UI design, system architecture design and web development.

In our blogpost Is it nice to organize?! we captured our experiences throughout the project. Below 6 important facts we learned through the last months:

1. Define weekly meeting hours!
2. Synchronize all team members on the same state of affairs on the beginning of each meeting!
3. Switch the subteams, never forget about the bus factor!
4. Use intelligent communication tools like Slack and Google Drive for optimizing teamwork!
5. Write protocol for documentation reasons!
6. Combine knowledge from each other to maximize your team’s productivity!

Cloud infrastructure

Due to the increasing popularity of using the cloud as a platform for developing, testing and deploying your application there are many providers offering these services. Like the american actor Jason Segel pointed out, the cloud is a mystery and it is a big challenge to choose the best service provider depending on your project needs.

Nobody understands the cloud! It’s a mystery! (Jason Segel)

In our blogpost You got cloudified we deal in-depth with the cloud. So check it out if you want to understand the mystery.

The decision which cloud platform we should use for our student project was taken very quickly. We decided to use the IBM Cloud Bluemix because we had the possibility to use it with free usage accounts provided by IBM. For all of us it was an entire new platform and we were hoping to gain many new experiences while using it.

Now at this point we can say, that a deep analysis between the different cloud platforms and services they provided would have probably improved our productivity and prevented encountering some problems, related to the cloud-service provider.

5 facts you should know when you are building your application in the cloud:

1. Your cloud platform can provide many incredible services, which you can’t use in a student project because they are not free to use!
2. Even a huge cloud platform can be down for one day!
3. Don’t use an external database it will decrease your app performance radically!
4. Be prepared if you choose a cloud with a small community – you can search for weeks for platform-related questions!
5. Don’t deploy too often – your time is valuable!

Designing a web application from scratch

In our student project we built a platform in the cloud where the local operating voluntary groups can organize their work with the refugees to avoid the messy mail-communication.

While using the open-source-software Humhub and the IBM Cloud Bluemix we encountered  some problems, which we will describe here as lesson learned facts:

1. Don’t try to build a social network from scratch, use already existing open-source-software!
2. If your application has more than one instance, be prepared that you need an object storage which can be accessed by every instance, otherwise some images or data will be missed if the user ends up on the “wrong” instance!
3. Scribble your architecture design on a whiteboard to get a general view over your project.

If you would like to read more about our project background and experiences with Humhub check out the blogpost Humhub and the humming begins.

That’s it, thanks for reading and good luck for your next project in the cloud!

Written by Natali Bopp, Andreas Gold, Jonas Häfele, Merle Hiort, Martin Kopp, Christian Lang, Anna Poth und Eric Weislogel.