We came into this hackathon knowing jack but remaining optimistic about our prospects in creating something really neat. As a team of 5, we were all relatively new to hacking and the tools often needed to create a successful hack. We came up with our idea relatively quickly: a website personalized for Berkeley students that could aggregate all the information they may be interested in, like the Daily Cal and the menus at various Berkeley DC's. I guess our main inspiration was our desire to make something that we could all use as a daily convenience. Unfortunately, we soon realized that we REALLY didn't know anything about web domains, web scraping, or storing data. So we spent a shit-ton of time just learning different JS tips and tricks, and our website was a bit more low-key than our dreams. We did manage to build in menu, news, and a method for integrating Google Calendar.
That's ok, though. I think all five of us can still agree that Cal Hacks was a much-needed learning experience. We all definitely learned something, whether it was the process of setting up a website, the methodology behind web-scraping and authorization, and the challenges of data storage. Who knows? Maybe we'll able to vamp up our website at another hackathon or something.
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