Blossom Data Solutions

Overview

12 week project leading 4 other students to help the founders of a startup bring to life an app to help special education teaching staff to keep better track of student data and practice better techniques to increase the learning rates of their students.

Why Blossom Data Solutions?

Our student team met the founders of Blossom (Muadh Abdulhakim and Brian Cochrane) through a class we were taking at UCI about Software System Design. We were given a bunch of different start-ups that we could talk with and we chose Blossom as our number one company. The biggest selling point for us was that we would be developing an application that could have a huge impact in society. This was later brought up by numerous people we talked to about our software. The judges that we were able to talk with during the New Venture Competition really latched on and loved what the application could do for an area of our lives that does not get enough attention as is. Another key point for why we chose blossom was that Muadh and Brian had great personalities and were easy to work with.

How did we go about our project?

I stepped up and decided to take on the role of project manager while still working on the overall application development. From here I separated everyone into areas that they felt the most comfortable in and gave them goals to accomplish and deadlines that we hoped to hit them by. This allowed for our production to move along smoothly and for us to impress both our professor and our founders. We did a ton of different things in this project including: market research, wireframing, entity-relationship modeling, database building, front-end development, back-end development, learned a bit about AWS, used github for source control, communicated between our branches to make sure everyone got what they needed, communicated with our professor, communicated with the founders to ensure everything was working towards the overall goal that they had in mind for the application. I hopped around throughout all aspects of the apps development and contributed where I saw most effective. My biggest role in the project was using REST api to connect our app to the database that we setup in AWS and implementing Posts and Gets for our different screens.

Where is Blossom now?

Unfortunately with us being students and this project being worked on during spring quarter, we stopped development of the application when summer hit as many of us had internships. Then once school came back around we were mostly focused on other things as well as Muadh going abroad to study. Thus Blossom was never launched. It has great potential but sometimes it is just not the right time for things to happen.