Khrafa: Moe than an app

Khrafa was meant to be a portfolio project for the end of fundamentals year at Holberton but it turned to a lot more.

The “Khrafa” mobile app aims to serve writable and audible folkloric children stories.

We worked on this project in a team of 3: Khawla, Jacer and myself. Over six weeks we planned and executed our project: 3 weeks planning and three weeks writing our codebase.

We elaborated different parts (features) alone and later tried to knot together

This app is basically a bed time story but with a little twist. It helps mainly parents to read for their children old Tunisian stories to share with them a piece of souvenir from their childhood but can also help adults remember some of the stories they grew-up with and we even thought of abroad Tunisian parents who want to introduce or bring closer the beautiful authentic Tunisian dialect to their children.

My part consisted in working on the library and some other features in the app.

Seen that it was a group we preferred to think in a group, we wanted to gather ideas and go through one by one but in the first poll nothing made the selection so we were rolling the chair and khawla checking her phone specifically her play store she said why not an app a story bed-time app

So that was the sparkle and the idea sounded familiar since our intensive interaction with children and the flow of ideas begun…..

Before this incident I was having a hard time remembering a story my grandma told me when I was around 5 years old

It was a family gathering and all the thirteen grandchildren were running back and forth all the house as the situation seemed out-of control our grandmother gathered us to tell us as story and not any story a “khrafa” the type of stories they were told when they didn’t had Tv or electricity , on how they bring the lantern and get in circle around their grandma or oldest nanny to tell their story and I can at this we were very attentive to what she was saying.

And there she was reciting her words I was enchanted: the words were different, descriptive and especially elegant….. and we manged to stay all calm and sit for the whole story

So briefly before the portfolio project I wanted to remember the name to story Nobody could remember it around but my grandmother so I knew it this will disappear with them and it is a great loss.

Every part of this app was fun yet challenging even though we were newbies to the mobile app development world we managed to learn a bit from a new technology within these past weeks.

Flutter really made our first experience with apps pleasant and fruitful with the help of its varied packages and good documentation we were able to write one code base for both IOS and Android and also for front end design and back end. Its widget architecture drew a consistent data flow.

Contrarily to our conducted experience with flutter, the begging wasn’t as charming. Figuring it out at first took a lot of time and space on our lazy computers which caused a delay in everything else.

We tried all three different ways of downloading (snap, compressed file ..) until Jacer got it first and re-read the documentation for the 100th times that we were able to link everything together and we set everything in place.

• I’ve learnt that a good software engineering background will help get the basics of a new technology really in a short period of time, that there are numerous options and technologies in the market and especially not to underestimate any aspect of the project. Previous to this experience I thought that front-end development was easier but no way to fix a detail about a little detail in the project takes a lot of trials and checking and re-checking (dimensions, corners, colors, shades ….. ought be coherent)
• If I have to do anything differently it would be not rushing and panicking in the early stage I won’t lie we thought of changing the idea and the technology used when we felt overwhelmed and unaccomplished in comparison with our peers work.

One key of software engineering is perseverance and it is learnt and acquired,

through this project I think I saw it in our group members who stayed and left each other everyday, this will be carried for the future.

This was the story of my portfolio project: me, Imene Ayari a hopeful software engineer at Holberton School Tunis.

Github: https://github.com/jaycer95/Khrafa

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imen-ayari1–77312a1a2/

Landing page link: https://1396644.wixsite.com/khrafa?fbclid=IwAR0m-yDQ8GBBPfn93meVq92YpPHi7x4oArmnJ6l1vsqwFEd130qml52FVgs