ArtGlobe was created for TechTogether New York's 2021 Hackaton by Brooke Rahn, Danielle Tulchinsky, Zoe Friedman, and Maxine Meurer.
The mission was to help users tap into NYC's vibrant art scene with a single, personalized recommendation based on their day's preferences, circumstances, vibes, and budget.
Have you ever felt mangled by indecisiveness? Are you in the mood to let fate lead the way? Regardless of what brings you here, the NYC ArtGlobe has answers for you. The ArtGlobe can guide both visitors and NYC natives through the deep, mysterious, and exciting art world of The Big Apple. Whether you think you've already seen it all or haven't seen any of it and feel overwhelmed by all the opportunity, shaking the globe is a sure way to set yourself up for a magical day. You never know what piece of art, theatre, music, cinema, architecture or design you're going to get.
The homepage is a stunning, interactive, snowglobe cityscape. Answer the short questionnaire and ArtGlobe's algorithm will search our curated database for a personalized recommendation, delivered to you complete with url.
The frontend is entirely CSS, HTML, and JavaScript! The ArtGlobe API was built with Ruby on Rails over a PostgreSQL database.
Danielle and Brooke teamed up first, having previously hacked together. First time hacker, Zoe, joined the party next and helped conceptualize. Danielle created stunning figma designs, while Brooke brought the incredible snow globe and additional design to life. First time hacker, Maxine, joined on day 2! Zoe built the backend API and made a first pass at the forms and algorithms, but Maxine swoooped in, saved the day and got the questionairre up and running!
Zoe: My first big challenge was figuring out the separations of concerns between the front and back end! Knowing I was going to be working with others, this needed to be really clear and we had to decide quickly! So a little more thoughtful planning as to what my actual routes were going to be when I made my fetch requests——— this would have saved me some time farther down the line. All of a sudden I was writing a fetch request that didn't make any sense at all! I've also never worked like this with other people on the same code. And on such a time crunch? And I can't see what they're doing? It's hard to all work on the same project when you can't always have eyes on the other people's work. I found working this way remotely to be really challenging! For me working with others through get was a big learning curve. I know it's important and I've been a bit timid until now. This was quite a crash course. Also bugs—bugs for days. Thank you stackoverflow and my amazing teammates!
Brooke: My biggest challenge was trying to figure out how to translate the designs on Figma into HTML and CSS. Even though Figma has CSS values for our designs, they didn't fit the screen size the application was built for so I had to learn how to resize everything or work around it. Due to time constraints, I wasn't able to code out the text in a wavy pattern like our prototype. I figured out how to animate the letters, but getting them to statically form a wave turned out to be really challenging.
Zoe speaking for Maxine who is furiously coding away: Maxine came late to the group and had to be brought up to speed on other people's work really quickly! This was due to the last minute loss of her previous team. While a helpful framework (like React!) might have made it all a bit easier/faster to build, creating this all in vanilla JavaScript provided an additional layer to the challenge. Also, Maxine has a young child at home, and took this all on while seeing to the needs of her family as well! The quiz logic was super challenging and she really busted her butt figuring it out. And the database she was working with while she was figuring it out before the backend went live was very small, which made it tricky. She also had a bunch of github noobs on her team and was on a huge time crunch to get the quiz inside of a modal. As of this composition, our modal is moving with our train——good luck, Maxine!
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I'm just so happy we finished! - Maxine
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Getting the button to sit over the snowglobe! It seems like the smallest thing, but it took me a while to figure out how to layer the divs so everything was where I needed it to be. - Brooke
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I am also very proud of my animations: the shaking globe, moving train and falling snow! It was really fun to animate the page. - Brooke
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This is going to sound crazy, but my proudest moment was submitting a pull request this morning that was a change to someone else's code! Working with other people in git scares the hell out of me and I finally feel like it's starting to make sense. - Zoe
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I'm proud that I was the 'Backend Engineer' on this project! I spend so much time in React these days, it was really cool to contribute an API that was a love letter to my city! - Zoe
We've learned a LOT about GitHub and working with remote teams.
Expanding the database of activities and locations as well as their accompanying details would make the ArtGlobe even more magical. With more time for styling, ArtGlobe would become more mystifying.