Project Proposal: Create a Public Dashboard (Issue #21, waiting for feedback)

[sihhanchao]

Hello @Mariatta !

As I mentioned in Discord about my internship experience in developing a dashboard, I would like to take Issue #21 Create a Public Dashboard for my proposal. My ideas are drafted below for your review, and some of my questions about Issue #21 were listed below and in Issue #21 page https://github.com/pyladies/pyladiescon-portal/issues/21. I would highly appreciate it if you could provide some guidance!

Project requirements

The project "Create a Public Dashboard" is to create a simple, public landing page without the need to handle user login. From my understanding in Issue #21 and PyLadiesCon Google Summer of Code 2025 Ideas (https://github.com/pyladies/pyladiescon-portal/wiki/PyLadiesCon-Google-Summer-of-Code-2025-Ideas#details-5), its main purpose is to show statistical data from the conference, like sponsorship dollars received, total number of sponsors, the number of volunteers, etc.

Dashboard design overview

Front-end design

A simple public page to display PyLadiesCon statistical data.

• Technology stack HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap for UI, and Chart.js for statistical charts.
• Questions or ideas Is there any specific front-end framework that I have to use?

Back-end design

Uses Django REST Framework to handle API requests, and Django ORM to retrieve data.

• Technology stack Python, Django

Database design

A PostgreSQL base relational database that includes conference-related statistical data, including sponsorship and volunteers.

• Technology stack PostgreSQL
• Questions or ideas I am curious about if we would like to include more data related to participants, or should we display historical data as well? Would it be beneficial if we can also include data from participants, such as their country, background, years of coding experience to spark participants' interest and enhance their involvement?

Weekly timeline

• Week 0 Align expectations, define technical details

1. Schedule a meeting with mentors and get feedback on project design and best practices
2. Reach consensus with mentors and the community about project requirements (identify key statistics to display, discuss database/API schema) and technology stack
3. Check the development environment and make sure third-party libraries are well installed

• Week 1 Database

1. Design PostgreSQL database models
2. Load sponsors, volunteers, and participants data into the database
3. Write database documentation
4. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 2 Back-end

1. Set up Django & Django REST Framework
2. Develop initial API endpoints
3. Test API in Postman
4. Write API documentation
5. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 3 Front-end

1. Set up the front-end structure with HTML, Bootstrap, and Chart.js
2. Create the basic UI for landing page and dashboard
3. Write documentation
4. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 4 Front-end

1. Retrieve data from API at front-end environment
2. Visualize statistics by using Chart.js
3. Write documentation
4. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 5 Front-end

1. Improve UI design, such as colors, font, styling
2. Write documentation
3. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 6 Testing & Fixing bugs

1. Front-end testing
2. Write API test cases
3. Write test report
4. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 7 Testing & Fixing bugs

1. UI/UX refinement (check in various devices)
2. Fix bugs
3. Write test report
4. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 8 Optimize database

1. Database backup plan and implementation
2. Optimize database queries
3. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 9-10 Finalize

1. Finalize the codebase and documentation
2. Schedule meetings with mentors and the team

• Week 11 Code freeze
• Week 12 Final week: submitting the project

[fe-cmd]

I have started my code workflow on this field already and as well for the other 2 ideas following it which is starting the sponsorship portal and adding more functionalities, i would love to work more on this project as it encompasses the other two kindly check out my github page to see https://github.com/pulls having #74 and other two

[Mariatta]

Questions or ideas I am curious about if we would like to include more data related to participants, or should we display historical data as well? Would it be beneficial if we can also include data from participants, such as their country, background, years of coding experience to spark participants' interest and enhance their involvement?

This is a great idea! But the data must be anonymized.
We may be able to pull this data from the ticketing platform, so the task here will be to integrate and read data from our ticketing provider and calculate the stats through the dashboard.

In your proposal, you mentioned about using Django Rest Framework and Postman.
In my mind, we shouldn't need any of those and simply read most of the data from the webportal itself.

We might need to integrate with 3rd party services, but we probably wouldn't be using Postman as part of the development.

Load data into database: I'm not sure what you mean by "load data". The data should be part of the portal itself, except for the ones that comes from third party. For the third party integration, perhaps what you really need is to build up the integration to import those data from their API, eg research their API endpoints and write up Python code to import the data into our system, design the database model to store those data.

Testing and fixing bugs: The tests should be written along with the code.

Optimize database queries: There are indeed optimization techniques in Django, but this should be done as part of the development instead of waiting until week 9

[sihhanchao]

Hello Mariatta!! Thank you for your valuable insights. I will make sure to incorporate these ideas into my proposal!! 👍