HackBox Admin Portal Ruofan Ding, Thomas Grimshaw, Penelope Over December 18, 2015 A Major Qualifying Project Report: Submitted to the faculty of the WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science Sponsor: Microsoft Corporation Liaison: Ben Fersenheim Advisor: David Finkel This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students. Submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its web site without editorial or peer review i ABSTRACT This project was created to design and implement an Administrator Portal for Microsoft’s new hackathon management tool. The Admin Portal provides administrators the ability to view, create, modify and delete hackathon related data. This data includes the basic information about a hackathon, the hackathon’s participants, and the hackathon’s projects. The Admin Portal allows administrators to easily perform these functions through a data centric user interface. We created the Admin Portal using the latest web development technology and with design inspiration from other major Microsoft products. We developed this tool in Microsoft’s Cambridge office in collaboration with the Microsoft Garage team in Redmond. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Microsoft for sponsoring this project and providing us with the resources to complete it. We appreciate the challenging but meaningful project they proposed, and that it gave us an opportunity to both apply what we have learned at school in a software industry setting, and to expand our knowledge beyond our classroom learning. We would like to thank the Microsoft Garage team, especially Steve Scallen, Mahendra Reddy, Andrew Komar and Mike Pell, with whom we worked closely. We would also like to thank Ben Fersenheim and George Matthews, who helped and supported us over the course of the project. In addition, we would like to thank Henrik Joreteg and Jason Wilson from Formidable Labs for building the backend server our product connects to. Last but not least, we would like to thank Professor Finkel for his guidance throughout the whole project. iii Contents ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................................... iii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background .................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Project Goal ................................................................................................................................... 2 Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................................................................................. 3 2.1 Existing Hackathon Platforms ......................................................................................................... 3 2.2 HackBox ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Chapter 3: METHODOLOGY ..................................................................................................................... 5 3.1 Development Environment: ........................................................................................................... 5 3.1.1 Visual Studio ........................................................................................................................... 5 3.1.2 Git and GitHub ........................................................................................................................ 5 3.1.3 Browser Developer Tools ........................................................................................................ 6 3.2 Technologies .................................................................................................................................. 6 3.2.1 AngularJS ................................................................................................................................ 6 3.2.2 Azure ...................................................................................................................................... 7 3.2.3 JavaScript ................................................................................................................................ 8 3.2.4 Node.js.................................................................................................................................... 8 3.2.5 Sass ......................................................................................................................................... 9 3.3 Development Process .................................................................................................................... 9 3.3.1 GUI Development .................................................................................................................... 9 3.3.2 Database Integration ............................................................................................................. 10 Chapter 4: RESULTS ............................................................................................................................... 11 4.1 Code ............................................................................................................................................ 11 4.2 Features....................................................................................................................................... 12 4.2.1 Start Page ............................................................................................................................. 12 4.2.2 Hackathons ........................................................................................................................... 13 4.2.3 Projects ................................................................................................................................. 15 4.2.4 Users ..................................................................................................................................... 16 Chapter 5: FUTURE WORK ..................................................................................................................... 17 5.1 Admin Portal ................................................................................................................................ 17 5.1.1 Additional Content ................................................................................................................ 17 iv 5.1.2 Design Finalization ................................................................................................................ 18 5.1.3 Super Admin Features ........................................................................................................... 18 5.2 HackBox Website ......................................................................................................................... 18 5.3 Database Work ............................................................................................................................ 19 5.3.1 Schema Changes ................................................................................................................... 19 5.3.2 Data Migration ...................................................................................................................... 19 5.3.3 Database Stability ................................................................................................................. 19 5.4 Externalization Work.................................................................................................................... 20 5.4.1 Internal Trials ........................................................................................................................ 20 5.4.2 Authentication Mechanisms .................................................................................................. 20 5.4.3 Public HackBox ...................................................................................................................... 20 5.4.4 Product Name ....................................................................................................................... 21 5.4.5 Globalization ......................................................................................................................... 21 5.5 Generic Work ............................................................................................................................... 21 5.5.1 Personal Hackathons ............................................................................................................. 21 Chapter 6: CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................ 23 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................... 24 v Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION Hackathons are contests to design, create, and share computer programs in a specified time frame. Hackathons can last anywhere from a few hours to a week, with dozens to thousands of participants working on projects. Hackathons are designed