Variable Outcomes (Team Zero)

Hack nights made easy!

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Inspiration

  • Encourage diversity in coding
  • Simple tool to facilitate meetups
  • Who’s going to be there?
  • What languages do attendees want to focus on?
  • Women Who Code has weekly meetups
  • Social apps promote unconscious bias via profiles and photos

How it works

  • Voting website for weekly meetups
  • Members login/logout
  • Members have 5 votes for languages they want to focus on that week
  • Voting cut off an hour before event
  • Webpage resets votes every week
  • All written in JavaScript, CSS, HTML
  • Uses Parse.com APIs for user account management and database

Challenges I ran into

  • Time constraint
  • Normalizing the database - just not enough time
  • Adding unvote feature
  • Doing responsive design when you're just trying to get something to work

Target audience

  • Any level of coder
  • Coders that want to improve skills
  • Facilitator of meetups
  • Coders that want to join local breakouts

Current features

  • Login/Logout
  • Create account
  • Status of attendees (going/busy/unknown)
  • Webpage
  • Parse.com APIs
  • Tracks # of votes left per account
  • Keeps running total of all votes

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • The fancy CSS that does the voting highlights on hover
  • The database working :P
  • The code night logo/top banner on the site
  • That we have a functional demo

Team Roles

  • Constanza: Teacher, Team motivator
  • Karalyn: Javascript, HTML, CSS developer
  • Alicia: Database designer, class clown
  • Christine: Mini Challenge Champion, Creative graphics, Content Creator

What I learned

  • Fancy CSS tricks for hover highlights
  • How to use Parse.com APIs
  • How to use the Intel XDK
  • How to build a mobile app - we made a test app before starting our project
  • That even advanced developers make rookie mistakes
  • How to normalize a database
  • How to decode in binary - mini challenge
  • That hackathons are very time constrained

What's next for Variable Outcome

  • Future features:
  • Way to see where members placed their votes, in case attendees want to break out from majority
  • Ability to change currentUsers vote
  • Create hosting site with pre-made templates (hosting, database, team accounts)
  • Generalize app for wider use (beer, games, library, HOAs, etc.)
  • Gamification, give badges
  • Wall of Fame (winners, popular topics)
  • Mobile app and Responsive Design
  • Normalize Database
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