This topic contains 1 reply, has 1 voice, and was last updated by 
-
Posts
-
Thanks to all who attended our second hackathon, it went remarkably well. You can read all about it here.
This weekend's hackathon will be online-only!
[hr]
WHAT
We'll be picking up where we left off from the other hackathon: finishing our work on Group Income Simple — the simplified version of Group Income that we'll be using with real groups to study and polish the design of the fully decentralized version of Group Income.
Our goals for this hackathon include:
- Creating a great, flexible NodeJS & Grunt-based development environment for both the backend and the frontend — in one repo.
- Get as close as possible to finishing the integration between the front-end and the backend
- As usual, bringing any newcomers up-to-speed on the design and codebase of
Group Income Simple
- If we managed to get everything nicely setup for newcomers to dive in and start picking things up, then move everything to a public GitHub repo
- If there is time and/or manpower available, work on the Group Income crowdfund content
WHEN
NOTE: On March 13th clocks move forward by one hour in America but not Europe!
Saturday: 1pm Pacific Time – till we call it a night
- Sunday: 1pm Pacific Time – till we call it a night (don't forget clocks move forward 1hr in America!)
WHERE
Group Income's Gitter channel!
- Maybe Skype!
[hr]
Retweets appreciated!
Hackathon #3 Recap
Goals Achieved
✅ Bring newcomers up-to-speed on the design and codebase of Group Income Simple.
Many thanks go to Cayman Nava and Andrea Devers (and yours truly) for joining us this hackathon! Together, many a great feat were accomplished on the front-end of the website.
✅ Create a great, flexible Node.js & Grunt-based development environment for both the backend and the frontend — in one repo.
I can say with confidence that we have one of the sweetest development environments and project structures of any Node.js project out there.
Just one command: grunt dev — is all that's needed to:
- Launch the backend API server
- Launch a frontend HTTP server for viewing the site as you work on it
- Launch a live-reload server to live-refresh the your browser whenever you make changes
- Watch for changes to the frontend's source and automatically rebuild the site (plus refresh your browser)
- Watch for changes to the backend's source and automatically relaunch it
Vue.js: Our frontend framework
We “componentized” several of Aaron's frontend widgets into .vue files, and we made it straightforward for designers like Aaron to create plain old .html files and work comfortably with Vue.js (our favorite frontend framework).
To see why we chose Vue.js over ReactJS, see:
In a nutshell: Vue.js is simpler to use than React, yet just as—if not more—powerful.
Our repo is neatly organized into three main folders:
- backend/
- frontend/ — Contains standard .html pages like the homepage and the about page
- frontend/simple/ — Contains .vue and .js files that are compiled down to a single .js bundle using browserify and then loaded as a modern single-page app (for when users are logged in to their groups)
Also, a lot of miscellaneous R&D also went into this hackathon to ensure that we do the best we can on the security aspect of the website (for example, did you know that cookies are still the best way to authenticate a user to a website?).
What didn't we get to?
We still need to get all the widgets on the front-end talking to the backend, and we need to finish the UI/design/markup for the frontend. We also need to verify that everything works on the backend and finish any remaining features.
We also did not publish the source to GitHub yet, but don't worry that will be the first thing we do during the next hackathon (March 26th – 27th)!
General Hackathon Insights
Hackathons are a wonderful and remarkably different way of Getting Things Done. They represent a total departure from the typical 9-5 Monday-Friday work schedule.
Hackathons seem ideal for certain situations and stages during the life of an open source project, but you've got to know how to do them right. I'm learning various insights as I go!
For example, it's possible to accomplish quite a lot during a two-day hackathon—even a week's worth of work!—but at the same time hackathons can be quite draining due to their full-on focused intensity. I noticed this when I saw myself posting unusually angry tweets to twitter and it dawned on me that the draining effects of the hackathon made it easier to stress out.
So from now on I'll be taking a recovery day (or two) after each hackathon. That works out quite well, for it gives an excellent reason to do a post-hackathon celebration! 😀 It's a great opportunity for teams to hang out together and bond over lunch/dinner, watch a movie, etc.
Next Hackathon: March 26th – 27th!
As usual, details will be announced by @Group_Income and posted to this forum.
We'd love for you to join us then! 😀
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.