Pomodemy

An academic-fantasy-themed Pomodoro timer that plays YouTube music to get you in the right headspace to do work.

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Inspiration

When I want to be productive, I use the Study With Me in Skyrim YouTube videos, which plays music from the game while running a pomodoro timer. Lately, I've been thinking that it would be cool to have different music with a pomodoro timer for when I am in different moods, and this hackathon gave me an opportunity to create it.

What it does

Pomodemy is a handy productivity tool in the form of a browser site that will run a 25/5 pomodoro timer while playing audio from a YouTube link on loop during work phases. It is responsive and will reformat according to what size device the user is accessing the site from, making it suitable for desktop, tablet, and mobile use.

How we built it

I used Claude Code with the dedicated Devpost hackathon plugin.

Challenges we ran into

In many ways, I found working with Claude to be similar to working with a developer to bring my designs to life. The big difference was that with a human developer, I am used to being able to use Figma to communicate what the product should look like, and I wasn't able to do that within the scope of this hackathon. Sometimes, Claude would give me an ASCII mockup of the general layout, but the many quirks of Terminal made it effectively impossible to pass an adjusted ASCII mockup back. (You try editing ASCII when copying and pasting multiple lines doesn't even show the output in Terminal.) Instead, I had to describe in words what I wanted. This ended up getting me better results than I expected, but for true fine-tuning, it was easiest to open the CSS file myself to adjust fiddly margin spacing.

There were multiple issues deploying to Github and making the program work in the Vercel live link. Things that had been working in the local version of the program didn't work in Vercel, and I had no idea why. I had to ask Claude to debug this for me, which took a while. It turned out that there was an issue with the file structure preventing Vercel from accessing sound assets it should have had, and everything had to be rewritten and redeployed to Github to fix this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm happy to have outputted something that works that lives at a live link! This isn't the type of project that I would have typically been able to do by myself, especially within the 2 day timeframe I spent on it.

What we learned

I've learned a lot about how to use Claude to assist in creating software projects. The flipped interaction model pushed me to think about project goals, reasonable features, specific product details, and edge cases, and ended up feeling quite useful.

What's next for Pomodemy

I built Pomodemy to suit my own needs and I plan to keep using it. As time goes on, I might think of other features that make me more productive and add them on.

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