The Cracked Cauldron

Dine with weird witches!

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Inspiration

I participated in the Hacker Fellows boot camp in the summer of 2019. We were learning different technologies each day such as postgreSQL, Ruby, Ruby-on-Rails, and HTML/CSS. Our final project was to create a restaurant with the theme of "enchanted." Our team name was "Warped Carrot" (we didn't pick it! But we rolled with it), and we were instantly inspired to create a witchy, dark theme! From there, it was history :)

What it does

When you enter this world of witches, you have the option to play some spoopy music. From there, you can order food at this make-believe witchy restaurant! Beware, some of the food names are not for the faint-hearted! The faces are of me and my project partner, Emily!

How we built it

I sketched the landscape background in Procreate on iPad, and Emily used Microsoft Word to cut and paste elements to create the characters and design. We used gifs to give an interactive, spoopy feel for visitors. It was a very scrappy, fun project experimenting with mixed media.

Because our website design was very creative and unconventional, we created the artistic components necessary first, laid that down on our website, and then began to work on the logical components (Javascript). It was quite simple.

Challenges we ran into

Towards the end of the project, we wanted to host this website using Ruby on Rails with postgreSQL as the database, so that actual customers could order dishes. My project partner was doing the back end... when disaster struck! Water spilled all over her laptop, and we lost the progress we had done in the last 9 hours. (Lesson: PUSH EARLY, PUSH OFTEN!). If we could go back in time, we'd push early and often.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made this in a few hours after deciding to make our vision of a pair of witches in the woods cooking up food. So, I am super proud of our quick, creative thinking and unwavering determination to do this. I'm also proud of myself for having fun and allowing myself to leave the realm of creating traditional, "professional" websites and using pre-made templates. Everything on the page was pieced together like a scrap book photo.

What we learned

I learned that I enjoy working with others who are creative and passionate about what we're doing. That is a must. Energy is contagious and nothing is better than staying up late at night with a friend who is as 100% into the project as you are. It feeds the project and gives us energy to persevere.

I also learned that I am the kind of person that loves to create, no matter what it is. The things I create may not be the best quality. But for me, it is the journey of creating that is the most satisfying. From repeating this pattern of creating content, I get better at my craft, which leads to better content.

What's next for The Cracked Cauldron

This is a stand-alone piece. That isn't to say I definitely won't work on this in the future, but most likely not. It stands as a testament of a fun, crazy website!

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