Code for YHack 2017
tl;dr: We've created a platform for users to share projects they've worked on and find projects they're interested in.
As students who come from a tiny school with a project-based learning curriculum and culture, we were inspired by the fact that even in our close community there are many awesome and interesting projects going on that we don't know about. Upon talking to people from different universities here at YHack, we found that students from larger schools are even less aware of the projects going on around them, especially outside of their majors. Our web app provides an easy way for anyone to share their projects with a large number of people, and a way for people- college students in particular- to inform themselves about what others are doing, and what kinds of things they could try in the future.
Our web app is a social media site for project sharing. It categorizes projects based on subject and education level, and has an explore feature where people can find something completely unexpected. On the Trending page, users can see the most viewed posts of the week. After creating an account through the website, Gmail, Facebook, or Github, users can upload projects of their own and “Favorite” projects to view them later. It also has the potential to make students more prosperous not only in wealth of knowledge, but in wealth of opportunity. Having a better idea of what’s going on nearby and seeing what people of similar education level have accomplished would help give students a holistic perspective of where technology is today and inspire people to get involved in a project of their own. For the students posting their projects, this could also be a way for them to be recognized by industry in the future.
We built this website using Django as our framework for the backend, and imported style sheets and UIs from Bootstrap, Story from HTML5 Up, and CreativeTim for the frontend. We utilized Dreamweaver while building the frontend. We also used the Facebook/Google/Github API to add login capabilities through Facebook/Google/Github.
We coded several of the web pages separately. When it came to combining those and integrating them with the backend, there were many style conflicts where CSS classes and tags had the same names. We changed a lot of names, debugged a lot of errors, and definitely learned about the perks of keeping code organized and constantly communicating with the rest of the team.
With little to no experience coding websites among the four of us, we’re pretty proud that we were able to make a mostly working social media site in less than 2 days! We taught ourselves Django, Dreamweaver, and the HTML/CSS elements that weren’t covered in Codecademy’s beginning tutorials.
We definitely learned the importance of commenting and organizing code. We also learned about the software designing process- the short time frame of the hackathon forced us to decide what to prioritize and how to not get too caught up on the details until there’s basic functionality. In the future, that will be a very valuable skill to have when tackling larger scale coding projects.
For the web app, we would probably try to fix bugs, add more functionalities to the app, and flesh out the website. For the team, who knows! We will definitely keep learning about web development, and will probably all be attending more hackathons in the future.
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Made with ♥ by Utsav, Khang, Emma, Diego