Come Play Pool!

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Inspiration

As university students we play a lot of pool. Some may say we play too much pool. However we never seem to be able to memorise our friends’ timetables which leads to a daily stream of messages asking “Want to play pool?”. This is followed by a flood of “Yes” or “No I have a lecture”.

What it does

Our application allows you to link your calendar with your profile. Your friends can then follow you and will be able to see at all times whether or not you are available to play pool. Availability is indicated by a yellow ball and a 8 indicates your friend is occupied.

How we built it

The backend is made using python Flask and the frontend uses HTML and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Having never done any of this before the learning hoe to implement all the tools we required was definitely our biggest challenge. Keeping our focus and sanity was also pretty challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finishing the project. Considering all the problems we ran into it is a miracle we even have an MVP. We are also extremely proud of what we have produced, for our first hackathon we have surpassed any expectations we had of ourselves.

What we learned

Where to begin. Firstly, software development is hard. As first year students, neither of us had any experience on big, unguided projects like this and so there were some important lessons that we learnt. Firstly, the importance of branches on Git. Many, many times we accidentally pushed changes to main without properly testing. However, our close communication throughout the project significantly aided in keeping everything going smoothly, and this project showed to us the importance of communicating every change that was being made, especially as we connected our frontend and backend. Technically, we also learnt a lot about how to handle networking and POST and GET requests, having no prior experience with any of this. Howevr, we also learnt how to push through this lack of experience and the problems by working together, being patient and using a bit of Google.