Let’s End The Cycle of Poverty Through Education

André Jeon
2 min readFeb 2, 2021

Recently I have worked with the organization, Village Book Builders, for my Lambda School’s Lab project. Village Book Builders is a non-profit organization empowering villages around the world to end the cycle of poverty through education. They build library spaces where children can foster deeper relationships with learning. They also help people bring social responsibility in-house by connecting volunteers, students, and working professionals to serve as mentors to children in developing communities all over the globe.

The current website needed different dashboards for different roles such as teachers, the headmaster, mentors, mentees, and students. Our main responsibility was to create those components.

I used React.js to create the Teacher’s dashboard. I also implemented different actions to accomplish editing the Teacher’s information as well. I was worried if I had to build everything from scratch but I quickly understood that a lot of time you will build on top of a pre-existing codebase.

When I came back to the code after a weekend, I realized some components are not loading on my browser. After looking over my code for hours, I realized my backend wasn’t up to date. I pull the most recent code down and I got my components to show up back again.

A lot of the basic functions regarding different roles are set-up. Now it’s time to implement a more complex backend to frontend communication. The backend data needs to be built, instead of being mocked. I do feel like building the backend data could be a challenge for the next group but since the frontend is mostly built, it shouldn’t be that complicated.

I had a great experience working with my team to build this project. I learned how to effectively communicate via Slack or Git. There is still some more room to improve but I learned the importance of communication. Early in the project, I received feedback regarding the lack of communication via Git. I wasn’t committing frequently to notify the team of what I’m up to. I quickly understood the risk of infrequently committing changes, therefore I changed my ways afterward.

This project gave me a solid experience in remote working with the team of software developers and the basic idea and workflow of web development for clients. Since I have this experience down, I know it will benefit me in the future at my job because I know what to expect.

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