Rainbow Dialogue

Inspiration

Coincidentally, my 14-hour inter-continental flight schedule conflicted with Hacklarious event. I really did not miss the opportunity to participate, so I came up with an idea that will keep me engaged during my flight.

Offline coding challenge. No outside dependency except for the C programming language.

I thought this would be a great project to work on, because unlike other popular programming languages, writing C does not require constantly referencing online material.

What it does

rainbow-dialgue reformats stdin to ANSI-colored text boxes.

How I built it

Before I took off, I took my time to set my Makefile up, then it was a super-long coding session. I think this project suits the word "Hackathon" perfectly.

Challenges I ran into

I was not familiar with gdb usage, so the debugging process for this project was a little more challenging than usual.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

That I could finish at all. Although the application can only handle ASCII text and formatting does not work for a few special cases.

What I learned

Offline coding is possible! We get so used to having tons of online material with us while coding, and I could never imagine myself coding for 14 hours straight without getting connected to the web.

What's next for Rainbow Dialogue

Feel free to contribute to the project if you liked the idea. Also, I can see text formatting can be done with other programming languages or tools. I might try to implement the same application with different programming language and see how that improves the developer experience.

Built With

• c