Deadline Fighter

Design Mockup
Demo Website

Inspiration

As SFU students and individuals with ADHD, we've found keeping track of assignments and upcoming deadlines to be a pretty difficult challenge. Between having to check both Canvas and Coursys and our own individual calendars, it's all too easy for assignments to accidentally slip through the cracks.

To make matters worse, with so many assignments burn-out is practically a given! We wanted to solve these issues, so we came together to create the one and only Deadline Fighter.

What it does

Deadline Fighter is a website and personal scheduler that aggregates your SFU schedule, including your weekly courses, Canvas assignments, and Coursys assignments. It helps you plan out your week and dedicated time slots for studying or finishing assignments.

But, that's not all! Deadline fighter is designed for you as an individual, and not just a student grinding out a degree. Using our patent-not-pending heuristic algorithms, it gives you suggestions to maximize your learning and efficiency, while simultaneously minimizing your academic-related stress.

How we built it

Deadline Fighter is split into two parts: the frontend website, and the Deadline Fighter API.

We used modern web technologies (React, TypeScript, SCSS) to create a simple, clean, and responsive* website for viewing and editing** your personal schedule. This is backed by our one and only NodeJS-based API server that securely*** stores your calendar data, aggregates your Coursys and Canvas assignments**, and uses coding magic to help give you suggestions!

*for desktops. Mobile app coming soon!
**not included in the demo.
***as long as you don't reuse passwords.

Challenges we ran into

Like all good projects, Deadline Fighter ran into some trouble during its development. We started off with a great idea, but we bit off a little bit more than we could chew for a 36-hour hackathon.

A lot of what we're showing in the live demo website is using generated data, simply because we ran out of time to implement the front-end components needed to edit assignments and work sessions. It turns out that creating an editable calendar is about four times the work it takes to create a calendar that displays events.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First and foremost, we're proud of our idea.
Deadline Fighter is something that can help a ton of students, from every day students who just want an easier way to plan out their week, to those with ADHD who are struggling with time management. We feel strongly that technology can be used to support and empower individuals, and we know that this helps address a problem that many students don't currently have a good solution for.

And we're also proud of what we accomplished.
Working under strict time constraints with ambitious goals is difficult, and it's tough to know where to allocate resources to in order to complete a project in time. While we didn't reach every goal we wanted to, we managed to create a functional website with user accents and a 7-day calendar view. With our small team of three developers independently working on the design, backend, and frontend in parallel, that's an accomplishment!

What we learned

We learned how to work together to create a project from the ground up as a team, starting with the idea, and finishing with a functional website to demonstrate our idea.

Our backend developer learned how to work with NodeJS and Express to create a functional REST API that supports user accounts and authentication.

Our frontend developer learned how to use React to create a website from the ground up, without using any pre-built component libraries or CSS frameworks. Just pure React, and a couple tears!

Our designer learned how to lead a team, providing project management guidance along each of the individual steps of the project.