TTS NextGen Alerts

For my senior capstone project, I worked with three teammates on a web application for Tufts Technology Services (TTS). TTS had previously used enterprise software for managing their alerting system for their user logs. This would help them warn users of when they my be using some software with malware associated with it, or something similar. They recently changed to a free license which had fewer capabilities in terms of alerting than the premium version. Our job was to attempt to recreate this functionality for them.

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I was on the frontend team for the NextGen Alerts project. We originally began designing the project in React and had a full sign-in/sign-out functionality implemented. Unfortunately, we learned after the fact that our authentication methods which were using Firebase could not be used for security reasons and that we were meant to use Single Sign-On (SSO). We spent time researching how to integrate SSO into a React app with a Flask backend and came to a dead end.

Ultimately we had to redesign what we had already created in Express.js with little time left in the year, since we knew that this technology would be compatible with SSO and I had previous experience working with it. There wasn't enough time to implement SSO functionality but our redesign would give future students working on this project a starting point.

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In the end we made a fully connected app that could send Elasticsearch Queries to our backend and email alerts to users. The experience working with TTS was a valuable one because I learned how to work in a more professional setting and how important communication can be, especially when it comes to a project with a strict time limit. In the end, I learned a lot about many different technologies and how to effectively collaborate, specifically in a remote setting for the first time.