TL;DR

Here’s a fun approach to a todo manager. It’s called the STACK.

Background

I was at my first hackathon today. Me and my friends Saser and [Hank][hank] were at our first hackathon today. It was a mini mini hack at the Spotify office in Gothenburg. It was focused around Meteor, a JavaScript framework focused on getting things up and running as quick as humanly possible.

The first issue we encountered: none of us really know JavaScript. To be fair, Saser and Hank knew their way around, or knew what to google for. I don’t know squat. But after two hours of a pretty fun workshop we at least had some template code to work with.

The Idea

Earlier today while I was coding I had an idea for a simple app. I was running around my code doing all kinds of stuff. I started with trying to implement something fairly high level, until I realized I needed to implement a class that was a bit more nitty-gritty. Then I started creating some utils I needed. I left a trail of non-compiling, unfinished code behind me.

This is a pretty common pattern for me. And I recently discussing this with a friend in terms of a stack. She’s not a programmer, and was intrigued by the idea of having a mental stack that you push to and pull from during the day. The problem, we concluded, is that humans suck at it.

Stack behavior: Hank

So I thought: there should be an app for that. And the next natural thought was that it should be easy to make that app.

So when we sat there at the hackathon, I dropped the idea, and we went with it.

The web app

Here’s the app!

And here’s the GitHub repo! Get forking!

I’m already using it. I love simple solutions like this, and I hope you will to.

The problem

Login isn’t supported. Everyone shares the stack. WHich shoul be fun to follow. But of course, everyone should be able to have their own stack.

A small victory

The hackathon was about three hours of coding, and we managed to finish third, out of about eleven teams. As first year CS students among people with bigger, cooler ideas, we felt pretty damn proud.

Also, check out the winning hack: collaborative piano!