Comet Circle

Role

Lead Backend Programmer

Team

Lucas Jagg, Allison Chiang, and Stephanie Li.

Summary

This was for HackUTD VIII (Texas's biggest hackathon at the time) which we got placed 2nd place in 2 prompts. For the prompts we chose, we had to make an app that help students for UTD and implement a new API developed by Project Nebula. We came up with the idea to make a tool designed for club organizers and students to use data to see when the best time to schedule or go to a meeting based on data from class sections from the nebula API using a heatmap.

To do this we made a Streamlit app within 24 hours, and the end result was fairly polished and functional. In fact, our idea and app was so good, that the engineering lead of project nebula asked all of us to join the team, maintaining our project under project nebula, which everyone unanimously agreed. As of now it's currently still in development to add more features and fixes.

What I contributed

  • I did all the backend and data management which included but not limited to:

    • integrating the API
    • designing a way to filter the data
    • getting the data to display into a heatmap format

  • I also did a lot of the project management to make sure everything was done in time.

    • I would also like to point out that a lot of my work would have gone unrecognized if it wasn't for my team making it look good in the way of the presentation.

Challenges faced

A big challenge was trying to gather all the data into a structured format that I could easily manipulate. For example, there is 2 sections of classes out of the entire 12,000+ sections that have a day but no time slot.


Another challenge was displaying the data effectively on a heatmap. Luckily we were able to take advantage of plotly's heatmap, however, it wasn't as detailed as we would have liked.

What I Learned

I had not known about what Streamlit was before doing this project, and after completing it I learned a lot about the python package and am still learning more. I also learned how important it is to get involved with in-person hackathons and other ACM events. I had participated in HackUTD's hackathon the year before, but was online and didn't have a great team (as they all dropped out of the hackathon). I have gained so many new connections and potential opportunities from this one in-person event it's hard to imagine how much I missed because of the pandemic. In addition, I realized how important it is to have good fundamental skills. Having built apps in python before, it was really easy using and implementing Streamlit.

Try It Out!