TIM - Time is Money

Inspiration

A TED talk titled "Stand Out of Our Light" raised awareness around technology and its increasingly adversarial relationship with its users. Technology now distracts us more often than it enables and empowers us to live the lives we want to live. In response, we developed the chrome extension TIM in order to raise awareness with users and how they interact with their technology.

What it does

TIM asks the user to take a questionnaire in order to gauge their preferences and desired relationship with their technology. In response to these preferences, TIM will deliver browser popups whenever the user nears or exceeds their daily/weekly technology usage.

How we built it

We built it using JS, HTML, CSS, and the google chrome API for browser extensions.

Challenges we ran into

None of our team was very adept at JS and web development. This project forced us to jump into the rabbit hole and pray we could climb out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a substantial frontend and backend using the relevant technologies given our primitive levels of experience

What we learned

JavaScript is complex, and good ideas take a lot of time to develop.

What's next for TIM - Time is Money

TIM is being brought back to Princeton campus for further development as a side project.

Built With

Submitted to

HackMIT 2019

Created by

I worked both on the frontend and backend of the project. I interacted with the Chrome API to help figure out our event handlers and how to store the relevant data. I also developed my HTML/CSS skills by writing the programs for the user questionnaire and the browser popups.

This project was super challenging and still has a lot of work left to be done. It challenged me to work with new technologies and collaborate very closely with my teammates.

dweybr Wey
I worked mainly on the backend side of things. It was my first time making a Chrome extension so I ran into a lot of challenges in setting it up. In the end, the backend was relatively robust, but at some point, we ran out of time and energy to connect it with the frontend.

We're looking forward to finishing this up properly and publishing it. Overall it was a great learning experience, but definitely one of those times where we had to stop before our exhausted brains made our code worse.

Warren James
Aspiring backend developer
I've never written a web app before in my life. Javascript is wild and CSS is like every bad programming practice I've ever heard of rolled into one. It was a neat experience. I helped debug the backend logic and wrote a d3 data visualization that was didn't end up being implemented fully.

Robert Laitner
I worked on the front end. I had some experience in HTML and CSS but decided to pick up bootstrap 4 during the hack. I'm satisfied I managed to squeeze out what's there of the web site out of my addled brain. The biggest challenge for me was design because I'm really a back end guy - designing for people was a new experience.

Aaron Peng

Updates

dweybr Wey started this project — Sep 15, 2019 08:33 AM EDT

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