Building Residents Management Tool

TIBS is a Barangay System tool to manage residents' identity and secure information.

The system is pretty basic:

• Save the resident information
• Print the ID of the resident

That's it!

What I want to cover in this blog is what I unexpected to learn; communication.

Most of the developers, working in a company with a hierarchy, they do the task on a bullet basis, this is no exemption for me. I'm used to getting the task list and doing the coding quickly. It gives me more time to think about the code rather than the domain itself.

Hence, I got the project with: do this, do that, worst is it's just given verbally. Until the project became bulky, there are features that the client didn't want to have in the first place.

Here's the list of what I did:

• Taking ID picture thru webcam (The client wanted it uploadable instead)
• Fingerprint Scanner (The client doesn't need this)
• API of resident info for the mobile app (I don't know what's this for, I bet the client is not aware of this)

Now, the most important thing that didn't address in the early stage: THE ID PRINTER!

It's hard to test if we don't have a printer. So the company has decided to buy an ID Printer at the last minute before the deadline. I went through a lot of test prints, PVC cards, and overtime work.

That was the moment I learned that communication is really vital I could have asked the manager before the project started what is the main purpose of the system, what are the pain points of the client, why we are building this, and not just getting the task list. If I think beyond the code, and get the real purpose, I could lessen the development time and ship the core features of the system early. I learned it the hard way. Never neglect to communicate, personally, I tend to focus on the code because "I'm a programmer", but coding is more than just code, it is a way of communicating with other people, yet in terms of code.