Hackathon Prep by Matt Buck

10/19/13

User Interface:  The look and interactions of a site
User Experience:  Emotions while using a site/app

Think about target demo
-Affects design and functionality
–>Who’s using this app?
—> Age, gender, purpose, etc
—->AARP (for retirees) site should and does look and work differently than Tumblr (photo blogging site originally for teens to twenty somethings)

Create user personas
-Build stories for personas of people who might use the site
-EX: Weight Watchers –> Lizzy, 37, working mom, needs easy way to keep track of her points and exercise and good way to plan Takes too long to figure out your points, users leave to use other diet site.

5 Second Rule
-Loadiing time
-Figuring out how to use app to meet their needs

Golden Rule: Under Promise, Over Deliver…

-Especially applies to dealing with clients but also applies to dealing with yourself (goals) and your team.
-Don’t get too far ahead, start in really small steps and over deliver if possible, versus feeling rushed and stressed because huge list of deliverables isn’t actually doable.

Really engaging video on UI + UX flow:

Resources for Team Hacking:

Git X
-Provides useful visual interface for Git Hub

Flowdock
-Chat + see work being done –> looks cool
Travis
-Alerts the team when new commits mess up tests

Code Climate
-Static analysis for ruby code review
-Gives each project a grade??
-Provides hit list of where in the code there are issues

Rails Hotline
-1-877-817-4190
-Will answer Rails questions throughout the day!

Ruby Toolbox
-Already bookmarked..can be helpful…

Div Shot
-Whizzy wiz??
-Fast, visual front-end dev
-Two pages for free
-Looks crazy! Somehow goes through code to start sketching out an interface

Burn Out Pep Talk:

Reason these camps are 10 weeks, people can only work this hard for so long
Don’t have to stay for 24 hours a day
Get out, see Austin, take breaks when you need to, quit for the day if you have to

Pace:
-Some people just produce faster, everyone working equally hard, human nature to work at different paces
-Yesterday we worked on things learned after seven weeks that most devs take seven years to learn