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Desktop App in Action
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Home Screen
Inspiration
My partner and I had widely varying experiences with meetings at our jobs this summer. For me, I had an hour a week tops, whereas his company used Agile and would have 13-15 hours of meetings every week. We both found, though, that there is much to be lacking with most company approaches to meetings.
What it does
Its alternative name Minify Meetings describes its goals to a tee. The two overarching goals of the project are to cut down the sections of meetings that waste everyone's time and to provide a way to keep track of the knowledge and planning that occurs at every meeting. This includes keeping transcripts/crowd-sourced notes that the members take during the course of the meeting. For older meetings, users should be able to link them to more modern questions if they are relevant, go back and comment on what was discussed, and have it as a repository of useful information. To facilitate this we provide topic tags as well as ways to link a specific meeting. However, upcoming meetings are where the real usefulness of this tool comes in. It saves time by attempting to move as much of the boilerplate of meetings out into pre-meeting time when users can finish it at their leisure. A good example of this is Agile Retrospective meetings, forcing users to come up with useful discussion before hand rather than waiting for every member to hem and haw their way through.
How we built it
We figured a desktop app would be the most functional tool for an office environment (with an eventual web app too to cover as many bases as possible), as smartphones are often not integrated in people's workflows. The Electron framework seemed like the best option for cross platform usage to reach the widest audience, and we thought Firebase seemed like a good way to handle the boilerplate things like authorization, data storage, etc. faster and better than our homebrew options would have.
Challenges we ran into
Firebase and Electron setup to start caused us a few issues, but those were overcome in not too much time. Losing several hours to later arrival and having to come up with a new idea didn't help with the stress. The biggest issue we ran into though was the Firebase Database. It might be an amazing tool, but for a novice programmer trying to query for information was a pain and a half at every step of the way and wasted all of the time that could have gone towards cool features like API integration.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Though we are newer to programming, we are proud we were able to come up with an idea that we can easily see providing a benefit to people. We were too ambitious in our tech stack choice for what we could handle learning at one time, but we still were able to find out a whole lot and see some of what is possible with our first attempts with Nodejs, Electron, and Firebase. We' re excited about where this project might go, so we have already started enlisting our friends at home to join in and help us flesh it out into a user-friendly tool.
What we learned
We always go over our head with what we choose to work on, especially since we don't have the knowledge to quickly implement what we think we can do.
What's next for MeetingsSuck
Looking into switching out our tech stack for something we have a better understanding of to make easier implementation of new features. Many APIs would fit nicely with this, such as Github, Trello, Slack, and more.
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