Blog Post 4: Corona Strikes

As I'm sure all of you know, Stanford has transitioned entirely to online classes. Students are being encouraged (some would say pressured) to leave campus, and those who have already left cannot come back. Dining halls are apportioning food into individual plates. There are hand sanitizer shortages. And Stanford feels like a ghost town. One of my friends writes, "the most we can do is construct voices out of empty corridors."
            To put it lightly, our Zorzal project has taken somewhat of a backseat. Unfortunately, our plans to travel to the Dominican Republic have been cancelled. We have not had an in-person meeting. Frantically trying to make travel plans has made it hard to find time to do work (either for this class or others). And when I do have time, it's hard to focus with uncertainty looming.
            Despite this, however, I do not expect the rest of this quarter to be a complete loss. We will strive to do what we can. Mark and Austin have been working on completing the prototype documentation. The rest of us have been working on revising other documentation.
            Furthermore, we do have a (somewhat) functional prototype. Right now, we have a "dummy frontend," which is basically the simplest possible way to enter data. You give it a shipment ID and stage, and it adds a timestamp to the database. Speaking of which, we also have a functional database. We have been working on improving our database structure and rules to have more internal consistency and less chance of errors.
We are now able to read the basic information about one shipment. We are refactoring the code to use a more modern version of React. Furthermore, Langston found a potential way to do data analysis in a Cloud Function, which solves a main worry regarding the Firebase framework. There is also the possibility of doing something else in lieu of travel: perhaps Charles could do a video call where he walks us around the fermentation plant.
Although this is not the ideal end to our quarter, we are still making do to the extent we can. Next quarter remains uncertain (how will class work when we can't meet in person?)  but I believe every member of our team remains committed to this project.
 
Signing off,
Langston