MakerSquare Day 46: Hackathon ::cough cough:: (10/3)

At MakerSquare, Wednesday and Thursday are given over to a hackathon--late nights, food provided, and lots of coding on the second final project.

Here at the DevHouse, my Wednesday and (probably) my Thursday are given over to a lot of cold medicine and vitamin C and tea. It's kind of a bummer in the way that minor illnesses during final project weeks are kind of a bummer. I'm supposed to be working my portfolio now, but instead most of my energy goes into getting tea. (Never again will I take my electric kettle--still at home in San Angelo--for granted.)

Ah well, I guess the only thing I can do now is get better soon.

That said, during my brief lucid moments--when the cold medicine kicked in--I did find an interesting tutorial on using Angular in a Chrome extension.

MakerSquare Day 23: Hackathon Day Two: Getting (the Small) Stuff Done (5/5)

And... scene.

Or if you're not into improv and would rather think of web development as a school/testing environment: Pencils down, everyone.

Because today was the day when our time was up and we had to present our products to the class.

If you've never been in a hackathon situation, here's a key bit of advice I got from everyone: start small. As our friend/housemate/TA told us, when he was taking the class (because, oh yeah, he's also an alum of MakerSquare), at least half the students presented unfinished and unworking prototypes.

Which makes my class look like goddamn rockstars. Not only did everyone have a finished prototype (which seems like an oxymoron but is more an Irish bull), but every group obviously learned something through the process; and, more interesting, every group had some clear ideas about how to make things better.

And my group has some definite ideas about how to improve our web app, Eff Errands, our efficient errand organizing system. (It could also be used for efficient pub crawls, which is another statement that seems oxymoronic, but isn't really.)

Overall, it was a good 36 hours of working, thinking, experimenting, failing, trying new routes, and ultimately succeeding. (For a different POV--and some pictures of the finished(ish) prototype--see Kelsey's blog here.)

It also always interests me that a little bit of work can go a long way. Seriously: it takes about three lines of jQuery to make a list that will slide up or down if you click on it--and it makes people so happy to see that little list sliding around.

The lesson here, of course, is to use slideToggle all the time.

MakerSquare Day 22: Hackathon Day One: A Well-Laid Plan and the Joy of Blowing Things Up (5/4)

I'm right now 16+ hours into my first hackathon and stopping right now to tell you all about it would be a bit like stopping a movie halfway through and saying, "Well, how do you like it?"

The answer usually is "I don't know, but I think I like it. Let's see how it ends."

For those who don't know (hi, mom!), a hackathon is something like a mock production: in 36 hours (more-or-less), we're supposed to go from

• idea to 
• design to 
• implementation to 
• screaming into pillows to 
• presenting the product

Usually, hackathons are done in teams, which gives people a nice taste of both taking an idea to a finished(ish) product and working together.

And I'm very thankful for my team. I've got permission to talk about our project before our unveiling Friday afternoon, so: we had four people helping to build our way-finder web app and each person had a pretty clear role, from our front-end UI/web designer, to our Google Maps API expert, to our floating troubleshooter, to our, well, me, who spent today working on the back-end algorithm for finding the best route from place to place.

Which brings me to the somewhat embarrassing part of the hackathon: my algorithm doesn't work. Now, this is both annoying (I like to finish things, I don't like being told I can't do something)*; and not all that big a deal, since Google Maps provides an algorithm for doing what we want it to do.

On the bright side (which I can find--thanks to some useful API), I did get my hands pretty dirty with some deep algorithm reading and a nice tour of some of Ruby that I hadn't played with before. Oh, hello (1.0/0.0) = Infinity!

*You now know the secret to getting me to do something: tell me I can't. Use that secret wisely.

MakerSquare Day 21: Hackathon (almost)! (5/3)

Instructors, like everyone else, have catch-phrases. Now, it's possible that I was raised on old sitcoms, so I think everyone has catch-phrases, when in reality, only instructors do, but it comes to the same thing.

Instructors have catch-phrases.

And one catch-phrase that we heard several times in one day from our great Javascript instructor is that "The other students are our biggest resource."

And, as much as I like Google for looking for an answer, he's not wrong when he says that. Which is why I'm so excited about the Hackathon starting tomorrow. (Or, rather, starting today, by the time this is posted.)

A large part of today was dedicated to preparing for the Hackathon: coming up with ideas, dividing into teams, asking some questions of ourselves and our instructors (who, I'll admit, are also a pretty good resource).

And here's something else that happened today which may help demonstrate why I'm so excited for tomorrow. (Oh, and also: there will be breakfast tacos.) We started today with a coding challenge: given a list of words, find which words in the list are anagrams of each other; and return an array for each group of anagrams. Following the dictum "make it work," I wrote out several lines of code that were basically readable English. It wasn't an elegant or the fastest solution--it was merely the quickest to write out.

Then a peer/colleague presented her solution and it was this beautiful one line of code that worked because she found the Ruby method that was a perfect match for the task: group_by.

Now maybe in my younger days I would've been jealous to be outdone like that; but with the perspective of my thousands of years (or maybe it just feels that way), I can see that single line of code and just enjoy the elegance.

And also, now I know group_by.

So yeah, the other students are a pretty good resource.

Bring on the Hackathon!