#makerthon

Makerthon! I loved this week. It was such a change of pace, and felt like there was some real purpose to what we were doing.

After pitching app ideas on Monday, we voted for the projects we’d like to work on and were put into groups from Tuesday onwards. We had a solid group of 5 and worked pretty seamlessly together from the very start, falling into areas of responsibility based on our strengths - and the end result is live on the web here: www.journeats.com

The time constraint (we only really had about 3 and half days to build it) ended up being a lesson in what our MVP should really be - we admittedly were a bit too ambitious from the start, and as the week progressed certain features had to be cut, and others were only dropped moments before our presentation on Friday. That was a big shame, because a lot of effort had gone into the Yelp integration that never got finished. Had we been given just one more hour, we’d probably have managed it!

I ended up largely responsible for the design of the app so first mocked up a couple of design ideas in Photoshop before then building them from scratch in HTML and CSS. I could probably have made it a little easier for myself by using a framework like bootstrap but I enjoyed the practice of trying to manage all the custom elements manually. CSS is a bitch, but I’m beginning to crack it. The back-end API calls were managed by other people on the team so it was sad that I didn’t get much exposure to that, but when that code was completed it was handed over to me to start plugging into the interface using Angular. Needless to say, I learned a LOT about Angular this week - much more than I did last week - and I’m a fan. Would be interested to explore a bit of Facebook React to compare.