In July of 2015, I volunteered to create a web app to score college gymnastics. There’s an old blog post from my original COGSS project. COGSS 2.0 is going to be a place to submit scores and have rankings for a meet. Sounds simple right? Turns out it is not, this project feels like it is turning into a full blown application which ideally would require a dev team… Instead there is me!

I wanted to do a quick write up of the last project I did for class, it was a scoreboard app written in Python and used Flask. For extra credit we could host it on Python Anywhere. The app also uses SQLlite for the database. All of the development work was done using PyCharm. One of my Media and Information classes has a lot of programming based projects. We used two main different languages and IDEs to get them done, the final for the class and the early projects was done using C# and Unity, while the end of the class utilized Python and PyCharm from JetBrains.

Hello again, I am going to share my love hate relationship with my latest web design project: spartanhackers.com Some background information, Spartan Hackers is a group at Michigan State University that holds weekly events to introduce students to various technical skills that they can use at hackathons like Spartahack. The Beginning Spartan Hackers started up just last year, and only had a few members to run everything. The president at the time wrote a nice website for the club that was using only static content and the grayscale bootstrap theme.

If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll know that I do some consulting on the side for some websites. LCORI is the Lake Chemung Outdoor Resort in Howell, Michigan. My grandma has been working on the board for more than a few years. She came to me asking to help fix the navbar on www.lcori.com, and I was happy to help. After getting into the code, I saw that it was a bit of a mess.

Who likes Angular? A JS library that is all about load a page once and get a dynamic website. Who likes Node JS? A server written in javascript. Who likes scripts that write code for you? Hello Yeoman! The first time I used Jhpister was for a innovation project that maps out the office seating. This is a great internal tool since we have an entire floor of developers and finding the third “John Smith” is kind of annoying.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that my girlfriend is on a gymnastics team. I did their club website for them a while ago. I went to a meet they hosted their year and helped out as much as possible. They were using a Microsoft Excel sheet to do all of their scoring for each event. While watching the guy use excel, I got a headache just trying to follow the complex steps that were set up for it… so I had the bright idea to set up a website that simplifies the process and allow anyone to use it for their meets as well.

One of my first “professional” website creations. Making the club’s website gave me a solid 4.0 in a college web design class where I reviewed the basics of CSS, Javascript, and HTML5. Fun stuff really. What I learned by doing this project is how important initial design and communication is. Working with a client (in this case, the “client” is my girlfriend a.k.a club President) means that you can’t just look at the website and think “Good enough, ship it”.