Slug Sightings

Our lovely logo/header

Slug Sightings Conception/Creation

Inspiration

Within ten minutes of Hackathon we realized that our original plan to make an iOS app was going to be infeasible. With this being the first time any of us created something that our teachers hadn't assigned in class, we decided to instead start with the basics of creating a website. And thus Slug Sightings was born.

What it does

This is a very simple yet awesome website. Here the user can post pictures/stories of banana slugs, both the human and nonhuman kind. This website will be a place where people can share their exciting banana slug finds on campus or highlight a fellow UCSC student.

How we built it

Since this was the first time any of us worked with html we were advised to use Web2py to write our code, and to go on Codeacademy to get a basic understanding of the languages we would need to make our website a reality. With those tools in our belts we coded away. We started with creating a basic homepage that included a post button which takes the user to another page to create their post. While Ruchi and I worked on creating the post page, our teammate Emily worked on creating the database we would need to store our stories and images.

Challenges we ran into

Fortunately, we were able to create a database that would store every story we got from the user and have it post to a page, but this little piece of our project took almost 10 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even though we were not able to create our initial plan of a mobile app, we are quite proud of the fact that we were able to create a website, which was something none of us had ever done before. Creating Slug Sightings as a team during our time here at Hackathon has been and is going to be an unforgettable experience.

What we learned

We learned that making a model before actually coding helps a lot in figuring where to start and where we need to go. The process of making a website also lead us to learn about databases and two new languages in the span of two days (Html and Javascript).

What's next for Slug Sightings

We all are very proud of Slug Sightings since it is the first time we've made anything together. In the future we plan on allowing the user to like and comment on others' posts, and the option to edit their own post. We will also modernize the design of the website as we learn more about different design elements.