Kohl’s Athenaeum Platform
In CSE 498, The Capstone Experience, I took lead as the Full Stack Web Developer and Project Manger on the Kohl’s Athenaeum Platform with a team of 5 MSU senior computer science students.
CSE 498: The Capstone Experience is the educational capstone for all students majoring in computer science at Michigan State University. Teams of students build software projects for corporate clients. During the Capstone Experience, students
- design, develop, debug, document, and deliver a software project for a corporate client
- work in a team environment
- develop written and oral communication skills
- become proficient with software development tools and environments, and
- consider issues of professionalism and ethics.
At the end of each semester, the College of Engineering sponsors Design Day, at which student teams from throughout the College showcase their Capstone projects throughout the Engineering Building. Computer science capstone teams demonstrate the software projects that they have designed, developed and delivered for their corporate client. Teams compete for four awards, which are conferred by a panel of corporate judges.
Problem
- Massive group chat of over 500 developers
- Questions and issue are redundant difficult to track
- Disorganized and confusing form
Solution
- A centralized platform to easily find code solutions and view past issues
- Discussion board encourages and improves cross-team collaboration
- Platform makes collaboration fun and encourages idea sharing
System Architecture
Project Description
Headquartered in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, Kohl’s operates as one of the largest department store chains in the world. The company’s business line features apparel, footwear, accessories, beauty and home products through its stores and website.
At Kohl’s, technology teams are constantly exploring, designing, and developing new ways to make the customer’s shopping experience more effortless and unique to them. In order to accomplish this, developers need to be able to share their questions and technical issues with each other.
Previously, the Kohl’s development teams shared a massive group chat of over 500 developers, where their questions were not only difficult to track, but were also redundant, creating a very disorganized and confusing forum.
Our Athenaeum web application provides an effective solution to this disorder by acting as a centralized platform for the Kohl’s development teams to better coordinate collaboration.
Athenaeum is an organized platform that brings order and clarity to the Kohl’s development teams; with Athenaeum, Kohl’s developers can find solutions to their technical issues with ease. Athenaeum’s web interface provides an easy place for developers to ask questions, receive feedback from other developers, search for related questions, and collaborate with their colleagues.
The platform’s simple and intuitive user interface gives developers the visual clarity for their collaboration, so that they can easily navigate their way to a solution for each technical issue that arises. Moreover, Athenaeum makes collaboration fun, utilizing a point system to gamify the experience of sharing solutions and resolving each other’s issues.
With a ReactJS front end, Flask back end and MySQL database, Athenaeum is deployed on Google Cloud Platform, making the web app fully cloud native.
Skills
Python (Flask)
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
HTML
Docker
CSS
MySQL Database
React (JavaScript)
npm
Team Kohl’s
Design Day
On April 29th 2022, the College of Engineering sponsored Design Day, at which student teams from throughout the College showcase their Capstone projects throughout the Engineering Building. Computer science capstone teams demonstrate the software projects that they have designed, developed and delivered for their corporate client. Teams compete for four awards, which are conferred by a panel of corporate judges.
