Link Click

Deep Blue

As high school students, we strive to get the most out of our time. As homework stacks up, so does our inner urge to procrastinate, where we seem to get out of focus and do everything else other than what we should be doing. Thus, I, Aman Shah, along with my friends Ahmer Imran, and Justin Petway, all wanted to make a simplistic app that would be able to keep us on track, only focusing on our academic prowess.

This app, called Link Click, is a simple website that utilizes a 25-minute timer, ideal for working. Once the timer is finished, a 5-minute break timer will play right after.

Although Justin and I knew Python previously, Ahmer was pretty new to programming, so we gave Ahmer HTML as a starter since HTML was objectively a pretty easy place to start on his programming journey. Justin focused on CSS while I focused on JavaScript as well as the debugging to make sure nothing went wrong with the outcome we wanted.

So why didn't we use Python? Well, Python is a dynamic language, which detects issues at runtime, which might lead to unexpected errors or behavior during the execution. Thus, we decided to learn JavaScript from W3Schools online to get a basic understanding of the syntax and structure. Thankfully, we were all able to write huge chunks of code all on our own, so in the end we helped tweak some mistakes we all inevitably made along the way, as well as discuss with the group what color scheme we wanted the site to have.

This was our first time participating at a Hackathon, so the fact that we all contributed to the website and the fact that it was able to run smoothly was a huge achievement. Thankfully, Justin and my prior knowledge of Python helped with deciphering the compiling of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

We also learned a valuable lesson of making sure of always working before an actual due date. I had no idea that March 16-18 would be the submission deadline, as I thought the hackathon would start around March 16-18. Shocked, I called up my squad and managed to make a pretty decent app in around 2 days.

Although extremely simplistic, with enough time, this Link Click app might be able to run calm music in the background for students who study to have a nice background environment. In the future, we hope to add more widgets so that you can customize the amount of time for work and break so that you do not have to be constrained to just 25-minute / 5-minute chunks.

Even though we barely had any time to make this site beautiful, I truly feel as though my team has achieved something extraordinary; ironically, we were focused on making an app about focusing!