Second Day is Imagination Day

 

February 24, 2026

Day 2 of OJT: Deep Dive into Design and Development Planning


If yesterday was about orientation and getting our feet wet, today was about diving headfirst into the actual work. And when I say diving, I mean spending practically the entire day immersed in design tools and development tutorials. My brain feels pleasantly exhausted, but in the best way possible.

Figma, Figma, and More Figma

    Today was essentially "Figma Day" for our team. We spent the bulk of our time designing the interfaces for the three systems we discussed yesterday. I've used Figma before for school projects, but there's something different about designing with actual implementation in mind. We worked on wireframes first, mapping out the user flows and ensuring we understood exactly how users would navigate through each system. Then we moved on to high-fidelity designs, choosing color schemes, typography, and creating reusable components. The attention to detail required was intense, it is the very buttons, every spacing decision, every interaction state had to be considered.

What I appreciated most was the collaborative nature of Figma. We could all work on the same file simultaneously, leave comments, and see each other's changes in real-time. There were moments of "wait, what if we do it this way instead?" that led to spontaneous redesigns, but that's all part of the creative process.

By the end of the day, we had solid design mockups that we're actually proud of. It's one thing to create something that looks good, but another to create something functional and user-friendly. I think we managed both.

Darting and making fire with Firebase

In between our design sessions, we also tackled some technical learning. Since our systems will likely be built using Flutter (which uses Dart) and Firebase for the backend, we needed to get up to speed quickly.

We went through several tutorials on Dart language fundamentals such as syntax, data types, functions, classes, and the object-oriented programming concepts that make Dart powerful. Coming from [insert your background language here], some concepts felt familiar while others required a mental shift.

The Firebase tutorials covered the basics. It's impressive how much functionality Firebase provides out of the box. I can already see how it'll speed up our development process significantly.

Were the tutorials overwhelming at times? Absolutely. But our supervisors encouraged us to focus on understanding the concepts rather than memorizing every detail. "You'll learn by doing," they said, and honestly, that's reassuring.


    Toward the end of the day, we had an important discussion about project management and timelines. Remember those 486 hours we need to complete before May 15? We needed to figure out how to distribute that time effectively across our three systems.

Enter the Gantt chart.

We sat down and mapped out a possible timeline, breaking down each system into phases: design (which we're doing now), development, testing, and documentation. We had to be realistic about how long each phase would take while also accounting for the fact that we're still learning as we go.

The schedule is tight, there's no sugarcoating it. We'll need to be efficient, minimize rework, and stay focused. But seeing everything laid out visually in the Gantt chart actually made it feel more manageable. At least now we have a roadmap instead of just a daunting number of hours hanging over our heads.

We also identified potential bottlenecks and dependencies. For example, we can't start testing until development is substantially complete, and we need to finish the database structure before we can fully implement certain features. These insights will help us work smarter, not just harder.

Reflections

Today felt productive in a way that's different from yesterday. Yesterday was about absorbing information; today was about creating and planning. I can see the projects taking shape now, which makes everything feel more real and achievable.

I'm also starting to appreciate the learning curve ahead of me. Dart and Firebase are going to require practice and experimentation, but I'm genuinely excited to build with these tools. And having a solid Gantt chart gives me confidence that we can actually pull this off within the timeline.

Tomorrow we'll probably continue refining our designs and start setting up our development environment. The transition from design to code is always an exciting moment seeing your mockups come to life is one of the best parts of this kind of work.

Two days down, many more to go. Bring it on!

Well Regards,
Laurence Ayo

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