Safari Blog

A safari-themed blog for sharing MLH projects and blog posts! Also includes "about" and "contact" pages.

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Inspiration

As new MLH production engineering fellows, we were inspired to create a blog to share our upcoming achievements for the program. Since all of us would want to create blogs, we created a template that can be filled in by anyone.

The theme this year for pods is safari, so naturally we made our template safari-themed to keep with the spirit of community within MLH. In addition, our pod is the Recursive Rhinos, so we focused on the Recursive Rhino in our project.

What it does

The blog is a template for recording achievements made during the MLH fellowship. It includes an about page for personal information, a projects page for displaying projects, a blog page for keeping viewers updated, and a contact page for reaching out to the blog owner.

How we built it

The front-end was made with HTML and CSS with no additional frameworks. The backend was made with python using a Flask server. We used GitHub and git for version control and project sharing, and we used a GitHub kanban board for progress tracking.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenges were related to us each working on different computers. Firstly, all of us use different operating systems, so the environment setup process was different for each of us, and it was more difficult to help each other with troubleshooting. Secondly, differing screen sizes resulted in the pages rendering differently on different computers, so we had to review pages that other team members were working on and give feedback.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Because all of us are relatively new to programming in the used languages, we are proud that we have a fully-functional site. Two specific accomplishments we are proud of are 1) a functional contact page that sends us an email upon submission, and 2) a low-poly art theme on the landing page animated with CSS.

What we learned

The two biggest learning experiences for us were git and Flask. Prior to this hackathon, only one of us had prior experience with Flask, and none of us had experience with pull requests. We also all had minimal experience with HTML and CSS, so almost everything we did was a learning experience.

What's next for Safari Blog

After this week, each author of this blog will be forking it and using it as a template for a personal portfolio for the rest of the MLH Fellowship. We will be using our portfolio to document the projects we create and contribute to, as well as posting updates on our progress as MLH fellows.

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