Capalyst

Prior to the start of COMPSCI 399, my friend Nathan, who I met through a hackathon the previous year, reached out to see if me and two others were interested in joining his project team. Seeing as my previous team from COMPSCI 235 (3 Headed Git) just so happened to be looking for three others, we joined up to form 6 Headed Git. Our team decided to build a showcase/awards website for previous COMPSCI 399 projects completed at the University of Auckland. Being responsible for front-end development and interface design, I prioritized keeping the spotlight on the showcased projects by opting for a sharp, minimalist aesthetic and keeping things as simple as possible. While I don’t think this was a bad idea in hindsight, I do believe my UI design for this project falls short when it comes to visual appeal. Form ever follows function, but this time it was trailing a little bit too far behind. As far as university projects go, it was a welcome change to be working with a tech stack I was familiar with - developing an app in Next.JS and Prisma was like a sweet summer vacation compared to the trenches of Flask I had to deal with in 235 the previous year. There isn’t really much else to say about this project from a technical standpoint seeing as it is a pretty straightforward web app, but the development process was quite the rollercoaster. Half of our team was embedded in some form of full-time work or equivalent at the time, so our overall output was quite low until deadlines started coming up. I’m not a big fan of the all-nighters we pulled fixing bugs and editing demo videos near the final submission, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy spending that time with my team. As Kumanan said, “Maybe the real awards were the friends we made along the way”. But we did win a real award as well. Best Computer Science Capstone Project, I think.

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