Hacker Times: The Coder Chronicles

"If our project strikes out, at least it'll go out looking good." We dedicated ourselves to crafting a creative, elegant site that we felt represented a part of ourselves. Now,we share it with you.

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H1 Our Story

H3 Inspiration:

We were inspired by the New York Times newspaper. As many are aware, they have reached a surge of popularity due to their games like Wordle and Connections. In fact, it was when we all sat together, completing our connections puzzle when the idea formed. However, we did want to put own own personal spin on it, so each page created has a personal inspiration.

What it does:

To put it simply, our site has many functions. It serves as entertainment, as an outlet, or as an information source. We serve all needs and all people. In the Opinions section, we aim to build a community for our users where they feel free to express themselves. In the games section, we hope it to be a place people can lay back and have fun. Hey, even the home page is a pretty cool site. But in short, this is a website. This is a site aimed for people to relax, unwind, and take in the beauty of our design.

How we built it

Our program is made in Replit, with the main framework in HTML. We have the whole trifecta; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With two out of our three members (initially four) not knowing any of the three languages, it was a massive struggle to learn, teach, and create. And, we only have the mentors, YouTube, cheatsheets, and AI chatbots for that. After we settled on our design, we began the HTML framework, creating a template for each page that we could go off of. We separated the tabs by files; a method we saw kept everything more organized. Then, we split roles for efficiency. One member worked on CSS, one on HTML, and the other on research and planning (then later JS/HTML). Collaboration was key, but inevitably it proved to be a success. We imported fonts from Google fonts for the CSS, found color combos on Canva, and tried our very best to make this site something everyone can enjoy.

Challenges we ran into

Oh do we have stories to share. We ran into many challenges, with the largest and by far most frustrating one being our attempts at using an API. You see, we are all relatively new to code, and only one member had known how to previously. She was preoccupied, and so everyone else scramble to have our news sites and the scrapped weather page up with APIs. This did not work. No matter what we tried, the APIs would not display! Even the member who had known how to use them was baffled. So, we innovated, thought outside the box, and persevered to make our project how we loved it without the APIs. Funny enough, we also had trouble with the color scheme. It would be safe to assume there were at least 9 different color combos we had tried before settling on the soothing lavender shade we hand-picked.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Again, so, so much to say here. We're proud that we made it and coded something, going in unsure. We are proud that we were teammates, and worked together to succeed. We're proud that we were able to keep our eyes open after 5AM (although hardly). One moment that comes to mind is the overall look of our project. We hadn't even begun to code until around 5PM Saturday, and this was in large part to our dedicated of really nailing the feel and look of our site. Proudly, we can all say that our vision came to life!

What we learned

As we may have mentioned earlier, this was new to all of us. Our first hackathon, new coding experience, first all nighter (alright, maybe that was just one person). Some members learnt new languages! Some self taught themselves CSS in a single night, while another girl was off learning color theory for the design. Mostly, we learnt that perseverance and dedication can get you through anything and you need to be unafraid to learn.

What's next for Hacker Times: The Coder Chronicles

What's next? After taking a long nap at home, we intend to pursue more hackathons! We will share this project to our friends and we hope to build upon it more! Who knows, maybe we get get our APIs to work first try. Our project is far from perfect, but we hope to one day get close to our version of it. Keep up with us and find out!

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