Storm Side Social

Inspiration

Our team from Simpson came as a group of friends that had never been to a Hackathon before. We have all attended Simpson for the past two years, and creating a professional social media that would cut down on endless emails and information we aren't interested in is something that we all agree would make our lives easier. Thus, Storm Side Social was born.

What it does

SSS (Storm Side Social) is a basic social media platform that allows users and groups to interact with each other by making posts and announcements. If a student wants to know when Computer Science Club is meeting, they can follow the Computer Science Club group to get their announcements. The user can also follow other users if they're interested in what others have to say. These announcements and posts will then be gathered onto the user's home page.

How we built it

_ Python: Cherrypy _ - Our background functionality came in the form of Cherrypy, an easy to use, Restful back-end API. _ HTML, CSS, JavaScript & Kickstart _ - Our front-end development was mainly in HTML, functionality aided by JavaScript and design made incredibly joyful by Kickstart, an html formatting library that gave us a Kickstart on our webpage.

Challenges we ran into

_ Inexperience _ - Our team had never been to a hackathon before, so we really didn't know what to expect. While it was fun, we were a bit flustered at the beginning trying to figure out what we could get done in only 36 hours. Not only was it our first hackathon, but we decided to make a website, something that we (having more experience with back-end development than anything else) had little to no experience with.

_ Program Sharing _ - Our team decided to use dropbox for our program sharing needs. The only downside is that only one person could work on a file at a time, and if someone saved, the progress someone else had made was lost. Thankfully we didn't run into this too much, and we all have pretty good short term memory,

Accomplishments that we're proud of

_ Learning _ - Our team accomplished a lot of learning this week. We really felt that our programming abilities were pushed to new limits in ways that traditional classwork and exploring doesn't do as efficiently.

_ End Result _ - We were very pleased with the end result of our coding. Our website runs and has quite a bit of functionality.

What we learned

_ Python _ - We learned that python has a lot of really useful properties when dealing with web sites. After using python in ways that we hadn't before, it regains its shine and reminds us that its place in the world of programming is valid.

_ Communication _ - Constant communication is key for projects on a time limit. It was already hard enough to understand each other in a room full of people trying to do the same, let alone taking down difficult instructions and assignments on what needed to be done. If we didn't have a way to communicate over the computer, I'm sure we would have given up a lot sooner. Instead, we made it through the whole weekend.

What's next for Team Thunder Squirrels

_ Continuation of Website _ - Our team plans on making our website more functional and cleaner cut in the future. As for hackathons, three out of four of our teammates are sophomores so three of us can come back every year to make even better projects. This hackathon was a wonderful experience and we're glad we got to come to HackISU to make this project possible.