Chores app - Project 2

CLEAN THE BATHROOM B*@$%!

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Team

• Rob
• Sylvain
• Wataru
• Tim

Problem

Housemates are dirty people and no one wants to take responsibility for cleaning tasks.

Solution

Building a flatmates task manager web app with notifications, reviews and score tracking system.

Features

• create activities - these are like chore categories but it's also where you assign the level of difficulty which will be used to calculate a score on completion. eg. cleaning the bathroom
• create tasks - when you want to assign someone a job, you create a task which specifies the due date and task owner
• task filter - see all tasks for the group or only your tasks
• give feedback - once a member has completed a task, other members are notified and asked to rate their task
• redo a job - if at least 1 feedback is negative, the task owner is notified that they need to redo the task
• leaderboard - ranks the members by score which is calculated based on the number of tasks completed and their difficulty
• avatars! - change your picture or use the default which dynamically generates a robot based on your name
• ability to join/create a group on sign up
• user authentication and authorisation

Demo

Several user accounts already exist:

user	password
zippy@email.com	chicken
squiggles@email.com	chicken

Try it out now

Technologies used:

Front-end:

• Backbone.js
• Underscore.js
• moment.js date/time library
• jQuery
• Javascript
• milligram css framework
• font-awesome
• robohash avatar generator

Back-end:

• Ruby on Rails
• Postgresql

Code

Routes: Only the user sign in/up have been built with rails routes. The other ones with Backbone routes. schema: 5 tables organise the database

Configuration:

Install and run the mac postgresql app Seed the database if you want some sample account and data

rake db:create
rake db:migrate
rake db:seed

Deployment

Run the command line rails server

Bugs

• Feedback notifications is still buggy. Currently only works if you seed the data and check 2 items as done
• No validation for creating a group. You can't create/join a group if you log in, only on sign up.
• Admin routes accessible even without logging in
• logging into 2 accounts on the same browser causes rails session info to get confused. eg. if you log in as zippy, then log in as squiggles and complete a task as zippy, rails thinks you are squiggles. Workaround: use multiple browsers. eg. log in as zippy in chrome, log in as squiggles in firefox.

Sore Bits:

• The syntax for the views. With 35 backbone views, establishing a naming convention that makes sense for everyone was complicated.
• The multiple use of dependent foreign keys have been difficult to track.
• jQuery ajax requests created problems so we had to switch to a Backbone ajax request.
• The notification and feedback features have been painful to integrate
• The zombie views (When we bind objects together through events but we don’t bother unbinding them):

event.stopPropagation();
event.stopImmediatePropagation()

That code is perfect at stopping a zombie invasion...

• Code working perfectly the day before and not working anymore the day after without having interfered with it. Probably the push/pull on Github is doing that.
• Dreaming in code...

Cool Beans:

• Working in team.
• Establishing a good view naming scheme because when we had to work with someone else's views, it was relatively easy to find what code we needed.
• Project extensibility. Multiple extra features that could be added if we had the time.
• Having a much better understanding of Backbone
• Establishing a Trello Board to assign tasks.
• Seeing our app growing.
• loving the app when it worked, hating the app when it broke.

With more time?

• "Wall of shame" - share group stats on Facebook to publicly shame underperformers.
• A graph displaying the teammates scores over time.
• A desktop interface.