Let’s start with what is Lambda Labs. Well, Lambda Labs is where I get to apply the skills I have acquired to a real-world product development experience. The project I worked on with a team of 8 web developers was called Merchant Market Place, which is an affordable buying and selling platform.
So what was it we built?
There are many selling and buying platforms online but for many small business owners it is a huge learning curve navigating those platforms and the fees associated with selling products or services online is unaffordable for small businesses with a small profit margin. Merchant Market Place attempts to solve this dilemma for small businesses by creating a platform that is user-friendly to navigate and with only the necessary features to make it simple and secure to buy or sell products. A concern before starting this project is how do we keep this project scalable but at the same time keep costs low, so we can keep it affordable for users. With Merchant Market Place, we strive to be competitive while staying affordable and easy-to-use for all users.
The challenges of working with similarly named components
Merchant Market Place was a build-on project, in which, I assisted in implementing the buyer search function. When this project was received that feature had not been implemented yet but there was a search bar created.
A problem we ran into was the the code repository we received was a bit confusing which took a bit of time to understand what each component was doing. For example, there are 5 very similar components named NavBar, MainNavBar, SearchBar, BrowserBar, and ProgressBar.
As confusing as the organization was, my team lead and I took the time to review the code and understand what each component was doing and found a way to make a item search bar functional.
What we accomplished in Lambda Labs and the future outlook of this project.
Our team was able implement the following to the Merchant Market Place project.
- Integrate search function into landing page
- Updated fonts and color scheme for consistency
- Created routes in the backend to get all items
There are many possibilities for features that can make this platform more attractive, such as:
- Implementing credit card payment
- Adding product reviews
- Buyer rating and feedback
The outlook of this project is that the lessons learned and the project will remain relevant due to the increase in online shopping. I can foresee the challenge of adding new features while keeping costs down.
This was a great real-world experience in that we had to figure out how to make the project work and build onto code that was quite messy. I got to work with team members that were willing to take on tasks and assist when needed. This is an experience that gave me a glimpse into what my future can be like as a web developer.
