Hack&Roll 2013
2013-02-03 18:00
Hack&Roll 2013
Our experience at Hack&Roll 2013
What we built
Our team (Nange) built NUSMorge , a simple way for NUS students to visualize multiple time tables together. Check out our intro page too!
The Stack
NUSMorge is built on Node.js with Express serving our requests, mongoDB taking care of unique links, with mongojs as the glue. The rest of it (creating the table, merging the table, parsing the input url etc.) is Javascript, with help from jQuery.
NUSMorge also makes use of the json file crawled by NUSMods. NUSMods is a timetable builder which many NUSStudents use. We take in a long url from NUSMods, and parse it into our own representation, and displays it in the our timetable.
Challenges
For most of us, hacking on something was a relatively new experience, what more having to work together as a team and come up with something at the end of 24 hours.
Communication is vital, stating clearly the route endpoints you expect to get, the object representation, error handling etc. All these were essential for your code to work together, and for the application to even work at all. It was hard to get the message across just by talking, so we drew and scribbled, and that really helped in our understanding.
Fatigue started to dawn upon us three quarters of the way through, but with the help of snacks and sugar, we managed to complete our application before some of us took a snooze.
Encouragement from each other helps a lot too!
Learning Points
Stay focused, stay motivated. 24 hours isn’t a long time, to be able to ship something that works, it takes hard work. What is important is to get things working, then start adding features in if you have time.
Learn to distribute work, and learn the strengths of each member. Everyone will have an easier time this way.
Keep updating each other. Everyone should know what everyone else is working on this time. There needs to discussion and communication, so that members don’t go working on the same thing (like writing two different ways of parsing), or working on wildly different things.
Source
Our project is on Github.