Project Overview
TacTalk is an Android mobile application that uses speech recognition technology to collect statistical data for Gaelic Football matches. TacTalk offers users to sign-up an account in which they can create and manage a team, set up the upcoming match and record live matches. TacTalk gathers and complies the data automatically in real-time allowing the manager to view the statistics at half and full time.
My roles within the project
Main role
My main role within Team Rojak was the Team Lead. This role consists of being the main person in charge of role and task distribution for the other team members. I chose this role because I believe I have good leadership qualities that I can utilize for our team.
Main Technical role
My main technical role within the project is developing the voice recognition system on the Google Cloud Platform. I learned and used the Speech-To-Text API to achieve the conversion from an audio file to a string of text. I decided to take this technical role as I discovered that this area of the project was the most important area when it came to functionality. There was also one other team member working in this area of the project and he was in fact struggling to handle all of the workload alone, so deciding to help him out was also a part of why I chose to specialize in this area.
External collaborator
I decided to take the role of the external coordinator to be the person who links the communication from the external collaborator to the development team. This role allows me to fully understand what the team is required to build by connecting what the needs are from the external collaborator to a suitable working product.
Version control
I will also be in charge of the Github repository for our project. My role here is to make sure everyone is using the version control properly and to check to make sure all the code works before merging it to the master branch. If any merge conflicts will arrive, I will try to resolve them.
Assisting development
This role involved me helping with the development both on the mobile application side and the server side. On the mobile side I worked mainly on the connecting the audio recorder to the Google Cloud Platform. I also helped connect the mobile API calls to the back end server end points.
On the sever side, I assisted with the development of the login and register system including token authentication.
Sources:
https://image.freepik.com/free-vector/team-leader-managing-project_1262-21430.jpg
https://www.e-goo.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/google-cloud-platform.png
https://abroadship.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PLN7.jpg
http://verificationexcellence.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/versioncontrol.jpg
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Technologies
Sources:
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https://firebase.google.com/downloads/brand-guidelines/PNG/logo-standard.png
Technical challenges
Cloud development
As mentioned above, my main technical role within the team project is to development the voice recognition system using the Google Cloud Platform with NodeJS. Implementing the Speech-To-Text API presented a technical challenge for me as I have never worked with this platform before so all the tasks that need to be achieved using this service will all be new to me. This role had many key challenges. The first challenge was reading through and understanding the basics of how the platform operates with all the different API services. This also included setting up a very basic working prototype.
The second key challenge within this role was to integrate my working prototype example within the project structure. This involved spenting some time researching through the documentation for possible solutions for this problem and once a solution was found, the next problem was to integrate the process automatically. I will discuss further about my cloud developer role on the Cloud Developer page.
Version Control
Version Control did present some technical challenges throughout the project. Managing all the branches of the team members to make sure everyone was pushing and committing to the correct location. Merging two branches together presented a challenge as often times there were merge conflicts usually on the mobile side. I had to handle any bug problems that occurred after merging branches together.