Inspiration
As women who had little to no computer science education prior to starting at Purdue, we have often found ourselves overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of skill and knowledge required to build even seemingly simple personal projects. We know how discouraging this can be, and we aspire to connect beginning and experienced programmers alike with the resources to achieve their goals and create meaningful products while building long-lasting friendships with other women in STEM along the way.
What it does
CodeBabes provides aspiring female Purdue programmers with the ability to transform their project ideas into reality by connecting them with fellow programmers with the skills they are looking for. Users can create project "posts" that display a description of their idea along with the programming languages necessary to create it, enabling them to complement their abilities with other users who share interest in their idea. Other users can then reach out and request to join the project either with an in-built request system or through the project poster's email.
How we built it
We first built a database and classes to store user and post objects into and then focused on creating a server and client network to handle user interaction with the database. Finally, we focused on integrating our GUI with the server and client network.
Challenges we ran into
We had trouble integrating our GUI with our client and server - and especially with making our program thread safe among all these different components. We also ran into issues figuring out how to preserve data effectively after program termination.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of creating an aesthetic GUI using only the base Java swing components as well as completing the equivalent of a month-long CS180 project in twenty-four hours.
What we learned
We learned how to better create a database that retains user and project information even after a user logs out or terminates the program.
What's next for CodeBabes
So far, our project exists only on GitHub and our IDEs, but if we had more time, we would ideally create a website for greater accessibility and data maintenance. Additionally, we would like to add enhanced messaging and networking abilities by allowing users to view each other's profiles and write bios to highlight their personality and interests. Similarly, we would like to incorporate algorithms that better match projects to user's personal interests.
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