Encouragement

Inspiration

Over time, programming can become a difficult and/or draining task. Our goal for this project was to find a way to increase motivation for programmers through the implementation of a fully functioning VScode extension.

What it does

Our program gives users the ability to watch relaxing short form content while they program. They can choose between pre-loaded content or even upload their own videos. When the user has errors in their program, any content that is playing will be paused, and the theme of their VScode workspace will change, alerting them to the presence of an error. Once the user fixes their errors, content resumes playing and their work environment returns to the default theme.

How we built it

We built this project using TypeScript and JavaScript. With these languages alone, we were able to create and publish our VScode extension.

Challenges we ran into

As with any project we ran into many challenges. namely the fact that extensions aren't typically used to display video. We had to research the panel feature within virtual studio in order to display our content in a clean way that doesn't disrupt user productivity. Another challenge was pausing and unpausing the videos, because this requires detecting when the user has made errors in their project. Every programming language handles errors differently, but our project is able to handle users programming with any language.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to publish an official VScode extension, one that you could use right now! This is something that no member of our team has ever done before.

What we learned

We agree that the most important thing we learned from this experience is that sometimes, you just need to trust the process. At the start of the Hackathon, we had little to no idea of what we were going to do, or how we were going to do it, but we decided to just start programming, and over time, our project took shape.

What's next for Encouragement

We would like to make the experience even more user friendly than it already, as well as provide alternative motivation options, for those who may need more than what Encouragement currently provides.