First Week of Disco
This week marked the first full week of school of my Junior year at Hendrix and the first official full week of starting work at Disco Tray Studios. We currently have two different projects being worked on by the five members and Dr. Goadrich himself. The first one is a neat little website call My Life in Months. This website allows the user to create a colorful chart that visualizes their life. Each square of the chart symbolizes one month, thus the name “My Life in Months.” This project is the one I have dedicated most of my time to so far. I have worked on a couple of bugs, a button that populates the charts with pre-made examples when pressed and some buttons that allow the user to upload and download CSV files of their charts. The second project that other members of Disco Tray Studios are currenlty working on is our official website. The purpose of this website is to explain our goals and have links and information to other projects that we have made. Two of our members are working on finding a stylish template to use for our website, so we don’t have anything working at the moment.
The CSV upload and download functionality for My Life in Months was an interesting little project to work on. I had never worked directly with CSV files before, so it was cool to learn about their simple yet effective formatting. CSV is a simple and easy format to use that is readable and editable by most spreadsheet software. Therefore, any CSV that a user download on our site can be opened and edited in Excel and uploaded back onto the website. There are still a few things that I need to polish up to get the uploading working like I want. Right now there is are strict rules that a user needs to follow in their CSV if they wish to successfully upload. If they get it wrong, then there is nothing in the program to notify them other than them noticing that their file was incorrectly uploaded. I intend to add alerts or warnings to notify them about improper formatting. I also intend to provide instruction for the user that tell them the proper format their CSV file needs to be in. I also plan to provide a few examples of properly formatted CSV files.
I am thrilled to be a part of the first year of Disco Tray Studios, and I can’t wait to do my part in this organization and see it grow and develop.