Inspiration
Arguably, one of the most significant issues in the McGill ecosystem affecting all students is the excruciatingly poor UI design of Minerva (the website that students use to apply to McGill, to register for courses, and to accomplish all sorts of other tasks relating to their studies). As a team, we wished to create a project that would positively impact the McGill community, and the idea to remake the Minerva UI into a nicer and more intuitive platform stood out.
How we built it
We used Django with Python to create the core of the website and its back-end functionalities. We used HTML to create the different web pages and styled them with CSS.
- see the GitHub repository: link
Challenges we ran into
As we started working on the project, we realized that it would be much more challenging than we had anticipated. First, the four of us are completely new to web development, HTML, CSS, and Django. We had to spend a lot of time looking for all sorts of resources all throughout the hackathon (from Youtube videos, to Udemy, to StackOverflow, and many more). We absorbed information like never before, but as the clock continued to tick, we realized the severe limitations imposed by the short time frame of the Hackathon. We had to adapt and implement as many of the important parts of the project as we could, while sacrificing secondary features.
What we learned
We learned a lot on web development, HTML, CSS, and Django. How to correctly write tags, how to better style the pages. A large part of the project was also to learn how to work as a team of programmers on a single project. We had to split the project and distribute the tasks, while also coming together to solve more complex problems. We also learned how to sync our code and work incrementally for the smooth progression of the project.
Thank You
CodeJam 2022 was a great event where we learned so much and had lots of fun. It was a great opportunity to expand our horizons and think creatively. We want to thank everyone that participated in the organization of the event for everything!
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