Our friend Lukas came to Kaitlyn with an idea for making a tool to organize 3D Robotics‘s software department during our Hack Week. They were growing fast, and it’d would have been super helpful to have something that displayed everything that was going on while also having a cute UI.
ENTER: WALDO
Our team was called “Cat Paws”, which included:
- Ed: Icon design.
- Lukas: Project manager spreadsheet overload + Apps script guru.
- Kaitlyn Hova: UI design + rails app master + front end development + staging/production server czar.
- Pancho: Kaitlyn's pair programming partner + “rubber duck” substitute. Specialized in quality control.
Project Requirements
- Need an easy way to know who new people are and what team they are on.
- Need an easy way to see who is working on what projects.
- Super hate company wide emails that tell where a person is going if they are Out of the Office, so we wanted to show everyone's OOO status.
- Want to know who has what skill so that they may be a resource for said skill.
- Want to know who is Technical lead on teams.
Workflow
Because we didn’t want to have our Project Managers learn a new tool’s UI for inputing data, Lukas used google APIs to take a google spreadsheet and turn it into a hash that Kaitlyn could use in a rails app via Https request. This way, there is literally no difference in their workflow, and we just pretty up the data they already have.
The data flow is as follows:
- Google Spreadsheets –>
- Apps Script –>
- Google Calendar integration –>
- Rails App
Results
We were the first (and only, to our knowledge) hack week project to make it to production!
Names and projects have been changed on the portfolio site for security reasons.
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