Turing Students Create App to Benefit the Arts
App: Gallery Time
Project type: Mod 3 Stretch Tech
Front End engineers: Max Bregman, Aaron Foucheaux
For Turing students and fellow art lovers Max Bregman and Alex Foucheaux, the idea of an app that makes it easier to support local artists and galleries was a no-brainer. Creating the app on the other hand…that’s where the work came in.
Gallery time is a mobile-first PWA that allows users to find galleries based on either their geo-location or in a city of choice.
They built the app in just 10 days while learning PWA concepts and solidifying their knowledge of React Hooks. The app utilizes the technologies of a Service Worker, the Cache, and Manifest to allow offline use and increased performance while online.
“By pushing ourselves to make this app, we came to the realization that we can learn quickly, overcome obstacles, and that we are in fact developers.”
Though they faced significant challenges using PWA techs for the first time, they found it extremely rewarding to bring to life their vision of an app that could be used to benefit the arts. The high-intensity experience solidified their self-learning; troubleshooting with each other and paired programming then helped them understand the material and accelerate their process.
“We did 100% pairing for this app and meshed our qualities of persistence, curiosity, and grit.”
Max adds that excitement fueled them as well. “It was exciting to use asynchronous JavaScript in a more complex way than before, which allowed us extra functionality under the hood.” And those two days lost to learning that otherwise given permission, POST API calls cannot be stashed to the cache by the service worker? It was still “worth the struggle,” he says.
This team was also driven by another trademark Turing trait: genuine curiosity. They gathered substantially more research than what ended up in the final code base. But that’s exactly what you can expect when you hire from Turing—developers ready to explore and rise to the challenge.