travismhayes / packthat

Mean Hackathon

Welcome to the MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) Hackathon! You will have all day to work on this. Tomorrow morning, you'll be presenting your Hackathon projects.

Many times in work situations you will be able to team up with anyone you want - you may have designers, programmers, and managers all working together on the same project. For this Hackathon it will be just WDI class, but look forward to an opportunity to work with the UXDI (User Interface Design) and/or DSI (Data Science) classes in the near future.

Before You Start

• Nominate one person to be the git master. This will be the person who makes your group's "official" repository.
• Report to your instructor the names of your team members and the name of your git master.

Format

You'll be in small groups of ~3 people. You are welcome to use the code in this repository as "starter code" if you wish (see instructions below). The idea is to work as quickly as possible toward something presentable, so make sure to delegate and check in with each other regularly to ensure no one is stuck on something.

You are free to make use of the facilities - work in the class or in the lounge, use whiteboards, projectors, etc., as needed. Get permission from an instructor if you would like to work offsite (like a nearby coffee shop or something). There will be no lessons to interrupt your work, but instructors will be around and available to assist you.

Tips for Successful & Fun Hackathon:

• Take regular breaks and get enough to eat and drink - it's easy to forget!
• Delegate tasks to each team member - your time is limited!
• Check-in regularly to ensure no one is "stuck" on something. Switch tasks if needed.
• Consider things that may save you time. For example, maybe use bootstrap or a free theme to make your code look nice instead of starting from scratch.
• Make GitHub your friend, not your enemy
  • Don't wait until the last second to get your code on GitHub.
  • Choose one person to be the git master (owner of the main repository)
  • Commit and push stuff OFTEN
• Try not to put off the "hard stuff" for last
• Don't be afraid to ask for help! Instructors and TAs won't bite. (Probably)

Presentations

It is very normal for a hackathon project to be somewhat incomplete - it is only a single day after all! That said, try your best to have something tangible to present. Maybe you had a grand idea and one day was only enough time to implement a teaser. That's totally fine and fairly normal!

Many jobs have these kinds of events on a regular basis, so consider it a good opportunity to practice! Be sure to have answers thought out about where your project would go next, what features would be added, what is the intended demograph of the project's users, etc.

To Use This Repo as Starter Code

• One group member (git master): Fork this repository
  • Other group members, you should still fork your git master's repository
• Clone the repo to your local computer
• Run npm install
• Run nodemon and view http://localhost:3000

There's your bare-bones MEAN app. Be sure and change the readme file contents and ng-app name to refer to your own project.