What was cool/easy/hard/frustrating/intuitive/confusing? ​

Never having worked with mongo before, and same for Express.js, figuring out how the router worked and dealing with all of the possible edge cases such as friending yourself was not easy.

Was there something you couldn’t implement or had to find another way to implement because of how we set up the things? ​

I was trying my best to implement speech detection and generation, as well as finding apis to do caption generation, only to find out all the APIs that worked had a harsh free limit that I easily finished during testing. None of the APIs were reliable, and all of them required extensive changes to the backend code- Vue.js had minimal support for speech features as well from what I could tell. I settled on integrating vue-voice, but as it was 5 years out of date, it was impossible to get working in any reliable fashion.

Was there any implementation piece that felt like doing busy work (e.g., coding the same thing multiple times, or coding things that you think should happen by itself)? ​

I felt that the basic friends feature in the front-end should also be implemented for us- it was a small edit to the post list components, and was simply grueling work instead of something fun to implement.

What was the least/most exciting part of your back-end experience? ​

The least exciting part was getting the modals working- I had help from online and it still refused to work! Eventually settled on using hidden components that turned on using values in sitestore, it seems like such an inefficient design. The most exciting part was getting Vue-voice working, only to realize it was horrible at compatibility and straight up stopped working 17 times over.

How do you think we can improve the starter code? ​

It needs more comments and proper documentation- none of what we learned in 6.031 such as proper documentation and comments were included in the code, and took a while to pore over and understand.