shrugs / Chicken-Waffle

Pair teammates together for 1+1 hanging out and straight chillin'

Chicken + Waffle

Pairs teammates together every week to hang out and get chicken and waffles, among other things.

Features

• Pairs teammates together for weekly 1+1 time together where they can hang out and stuff.
• Can also pair non-teammates, while prioritizing teammates.
• Gravatar integration
• Google Places integration for figuring out what to do.

Installation

1. acquire mongo
2. clone
3. npm install && bower install
4. Acquire Google Places Server API Key
5. export PLACES_API_KEY=<your api key>
6. grunt serve
7. http://localhost:9000

Note, because cryptojs (used for gravatar email hashing) claims that its main pacakge is **/*.js, which cannot simply be loaded, you'll want to manually change cryptojs/bower.json's main key to have rollup/md5.js as the value. This is just to keep everyone sane and keep grunt from inserting **/*.js into index.html.

Usage

The database is seeded with the various musicians and relationships as below:

• The Beatles
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]
• The Quarrymen
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]
• Wings
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]
• Plastic Ono Band
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]
• Traveling Wilburys
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]
  • [e-mail]

All with default password password.

You can sign up at /signup or by clicking the link in the navbar. After signing up, you can modify your team associations and add new teams.

On the homepage, click the GENERATE 1+1 button (with the optional pair loners check box) so generate a new set of 1+1s. This is stateless, so if you restart the server (and it's running in production because otherwise it resets the database), you will still have deterministically random (lol) pairings.

Algorithm

The process to pair teammates (in /server/api/Match/Match.controller.js) is as follows:

• grab all of the users
  • sort by number of teams they're associated with, ASC
• create a reverse map of teams -> users
• generate combinations of users
  • for each user, create a pair where he pairs with every other possible teammate
• filter out duplicates
  • using a ghetto hash that makes [a, b] === [b, a] for the purposes of the _.uniq function
• acquire and increment old nonce from db or set nonce to 0
  • nonce is the index of the first key pair
  • iterates through the pairs containing the user with the most team associations
  • I'm technically using that vocabulary incorrectly because nonce's should be unique and our's loops over itself all the time
• select first key pair using nonce and filter out any pairs that are no longer valid (i.e., users are taken)
• while there are still possible pairs to be made
  • randomly select a new key pair
  • filter out duplicates
• with leftover people (generally those on small teams or only on 1 team)
  • either match with themselves
  • or match with other leftover non-teammates
• store match in database, along with nonce for future

Future Features

• More event API integration for easy things to do during 1+1 times.
  • Eventbrite
  • Yelp
  • Etc
• Admin console for adding/removing users and team associations.
  • currently you must log into that user and modify associations from there
  • if I have time, I'll add this, but it's not necessary
• Past matches and events attended
  • to help you diversify your events and remember who you last hung out with

Known Issues

• Forms have no feedback; if you did something wrong, better open up the console and check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Testing

Tests available for backend controllers (grunt test:server).

This was my first serious foray into actual unit testing, so the tests are pretty minimal. I don't have the time to invest in unit tests for the frontend, so those have gone unimplemented.

I wrote tests last because I found them the least interesting portion of the development cycle, but I now realize that if I write them first, at least as a general idea, it'll help me during the programming phase. It'll also combat the fact that I now feel I am 'done' with the project and therefore don't want to work on it anymore, yet I still have to write tests.

Notes

I used generator-angular-fullstack to scaffold out the application, which made a lot of the CRUD operations extremely easy to implement. It also came with basic authentication boilerplate, so I stuck with the auth at the beginning. There are probably some places where an unauthenticated user can modify someone else's data, but I stopped caring about auth after it was deemed not necessary.

Issues

I tried out angular-material for the first time because I've started loving the material design aesthetic. The stylings are great, but I had the hardest time with the flexbox layout engine. I was probably doing something wrong, but my markup is just awful now because when I wanted a stack of centered elements using

<div layout="column" layout-align="center center">
  <div>one</div>
  <div>two</div>
  <div>three</div>
</div>

(from the tutorial, mind you) it always gave it to me in the row format. Getting things to stack onto each other was a massive pain, and it shows in the markup.

That said, I'll probably try to use it again soon, and this time a bit more carefully to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Todo

• frontend testing