What The Slug Is Going On?

A personalized way for students at UC Santa Cruz to post about events on and off campus.

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Inspiration

As Freshman, we really enjoyed being able to use apps like Guidebook to help us navigate what events were happening during Welcome Week. Guidebook was an app that listed all events throughout the college in various forms, such as a map form based on the events' proximity to the user and dorm. Since the first week of school, however, its been a lot harder to find fun things to do with our time, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. This is our solution.

What it does

What the Slug is Going On? creates an environment where UC Santa Cruz students can post new school events or outside events, such as concerts at the Catalyst , midnight movies at the Del Mar, or parties(whether they be in a house or in the forest) and share them openly with the rest of the Slugs on campus. It is more personalized in how more popular events will appear higher on the event list.

How We built it

We used JavaScript to build the front end and some Java to save input in the backend. We then utilized Firebase for the login and Google Cloud SQL to run a database full of information for events - name, date, time, location, likes, dislikes - all to help create a more organized interface and easily manage the information related to each event..

Challenges We ran into

We were getting "500 Server Errors" when submitting new details for events(issue with Google Cloud SQL). After plenty of debugging and messing around with our code, issues continued to persist. The libraries that were being used locally were not initially being pushed to the App Engine, resulting in errors when methods that required those libraries were being used. Ultimately, a unique exception was being thrown (still resulting in HTTP 500 errors) that did not have any results on Google for. At this point, we switched from using the database to an alternate data store.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

We're really proud of our use of Google API (Maps, Buttons).

What We learned

We learned that Google interfaces are actually really easy to implement into our of website, but if the code that runs the database is done incorrectly, you're website will run into a lot of issues. We also learned that using one cloud service works relatively easily, but the moment you try and combine multiple cloud solutions, the lack of synergy between the platforms is evident and requires a lot of time to debug.

What's next for What The Slug Is Going On?

A mobile version, as well as a better way to add and save events. It would be nice events can be saved to Google Calendar or iCloud calendar.

Tech Cares

Does it contribute to social improvement in a clear and tangible way? The whole aim of are website is geared to connect students in a way that has not yet been done.

How difficult was this Hack to build? Was a particularly difficult design challenge met? How polished is the Hack? How complete is the Hack, as presented? What work was actually accomplished as opposed to what was envisioned? The real difficulty came with debugging issues with our database. The website looks pretty official, but at the moment it definitely has some server problems.

How much does an individual benefit from this hack? How many people will benefit from the hack? We believe that this could really change the way people have fun at Santa Cruz. Big events can be even bigger with our hack. Yes, we've started small with only Santa Cruz students, but if successful, the same could be replicated for other college campuses.

Is it accessible and usable in its current state? Were positive user experience principles exercised? Is usage self-apparent or do you need a manual? No, its not. There are issues with the domain and server that when resolved, should make for an easy user experience. The website is quite explanatory and simple to use.

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