HACC 2017
12 Dec 2017
The page for our project can be found here: http://oha-grant-listings.herokuapp.com/
Going beyond the events of HACC 2017, the remaining members of Team Lucio (Johnathan and I) were tasked with building upon the product that we had created for HACC. This would involve setting two milestones for our project, and working to complete them before certain dates. Our initial due dates were November 1st and December 1st, for the first and second milestone, respectively.
We both knew that this would be a challenge, but since the product we had created for HACC 2017 had substantial room for improvement, we decided to meet with the leaders of OHA one last time, just to see what they would like improved in our project. We also had to push our old website to a new Heroku page, so I created a new one for the team, since Heroku seemed not to be working on Johnathan’s end.
The meeting with OHA shined some light on our situation. While they loved what Team ProgressBars (the winners of the OHA Challenge in HACC 2017) had brought to the table, they also didn’t like that there were some major shortcomings in their work, mostly having to do with drill-down functionality and some formatting issues in their webpage. After the meeting, we decided to take some pages from the winners of the OHA Challenge category - so we used the same charting software that they used, which is Highcharts.
Highcharts was definitely a game-changer for one reason: It was the only charting platform that would work with AngularJS. This meant that our data and code would not need to be changed much to work with Highcharts. Knowing this, we set up our first milestone goals, and my task was to install Highcharts within our webpage.
Installing Highcharts wasn’t so bad after the first four hours of working with it. It had mainly taken a lot of copying and pasting of code from one division in our webpage to another. After a while, to get Highcharts to work, I simply made a new page so that there would be no conflicts within the old listings page we were using.
Since the installation was a success, we breathed a small sigh of relief, but milestone 2 was slowly creeping up, and the goal we had set was to implement drill-down functionality, make multiple charts for each category, and create a tutorial video for our project. This proved to also be a challenge, but after putting lots of time into it, we were able to take out all of the bugs, and I was able to finish the video tutorial on time.
All in all, the experience was quite revealing for my character. I think that the effort I showed closer to the end of this project was much improved from the beginning of this project, but I’m still disappointed in myself. I think some things I have to improve on in the future (besides my coding skills) are my communication and time management skills. I think, from my experience at HACC, I wouldn’t mind doing another hackathon. They are very interesting and it is actually really good experience, because there is nobody there to hold your hand; all of the learning is your own, and it’s very rewarding to see the product that you create, because it is yours.