Stijn Houwelijckx - Littlesun

Littlesun

Little Sun is a nonprofit that provides sustainable energy solutions to communities with limited electricity access.

I collaborated with Little Sun to create a shift planning tool for milk storage facilities in Zambia, helping streamline staffing schedules across multiple milk hubs to support local farmers. I traveled to Berlin for five days to work closely with the Little Sun team, completing the project alongside a classmate and under a teacher's guidance.

This experience allowed me to contribute directly to Little Sun’s mission of empowering underserved communities through sustainable infrastructure.

Littlesun

Project Type: Charity project
Role: Development
Challenge: Develop a shiftplanner for Littlesun that will be used in Zambia.
Team:
- Stijn Houwelijckx
- Jonas De Bruyne
- Joris Hens
Date: 04/11/2024 - 08/11/2024

Development Overview

Deliverables: Finalized Features, Functional Application, Technical Documentation

The Littlesun project centered exclusively on development, with the primary goal of creating a fully functional application that meets Littlesun's unique requirements. This phase included coding, integration, testing, and final deployment.

Feature Development

Deliverables: List of Features, Codebase, Deployment

My Feature Implementation

As a part of the development team, I was responsible for a specific feature in the Littlesun application. For my feature, I developed the Manager Shiftplanner, which allowes managers to plan employees into working schedules.

Manager Shiftplanner:
- Add/remove employees from the schedule
- Plan employees on a daily basis
- Assign timeslots to employees for specific tasks
- Lock/unlock days to prevent changes
- Calculate the total hours worked per day for each employee
- If a full week is locked, do calculations for the worked hours, overtimen ...
- ...

Technical Details

Deliverables: Code Documentation, Frameworks & Tools, Testing Procedures

Frameworks & Tools

The Littlesun application began as a school project developed in PHP. After completing the initial phase, we continued the project using the same language to finalize it for Littlesun. This approach ensured consistency in the development process and leveraged our familiarity with the technology. The tech stack optimized performance, scalability, and ease of maintenance, including: