FillGag

GitHub Repo

Inspiration

To try out Meteor for app development. To have fun. To create a platform for people to draw together and see what will come out of those

What it does

One user can draw a doodle. Other users can use that saved doodle to continue drawing what they like. It will be fun to be able to draw

How I built it

We make use of Sketch.js for canvas drawing, and some other packages by Meteor as well as jQuery to improve on the user experiences (although UI/UX-wise is far from completed)

Challenges I ran into

CSS, jQuery, all the design stuff Storing canvas into persistence storage, in the end I decided to use Mongo but it might be better to use CollectionFS Sketch.js Eraser

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I was able to have the app somewhat working, and make the canvas from sketch.js look nicer than the default view by its author

What I learned

Meteor is really convenience for building app, but to be able to use it well I might need to practice building more app on it. I think I really need to read more about what the workflow is like and how to organize meteor app development in an efficient way.

What's next for FillGag

There are several things that I want to build but didn't really have time to:

Have a voting system for users to vote on the doodle they like
Use pagination for doodle retrieving, since getting everything from DB is ultra inefficient
Have a way for user to see his/her own doodles
Integration with social network (maybe)
Find a way to delete old, extremely unpopular, inappropriate data from DB
Some testing and coverage for the app would be cool
Proper documentation

Acknowledgement

I am thankful for the writer of DiscoverMeteor for providing such a great book for learning Meteor, packages and plugins authors who provide their work free of charge, and the Meteor team for building a very cool app platform.