AniMoo

The Anime Social Media Web Application

AniMoo is a web application created for the 2021 Meteor Hackathon event. The goal of AniMoo is to create a social media application that allows users to discuss anime, movies, and tv shows. We envisioned AniMoo to allow users to interact via chat enviornments, liking shows and displaying them on their user profiles, and allowing users to friend other users. However, due to the time limitations of the Meteor Hackathon, we were unable to implement some of the features we planned for AniMoo to have. However, we were still able to implement a exceptional user interface, profile pages, incorporate a 1000 anime shows into out “Anime List” page, and include a “like” functionality that allows users to like their favorite anime shows from the list.

Skills learned and Knowledge Gained

The development for this application was for the 2021 Meteor Hackathon, which was the first coding competition that I have ever entered. Prior to the start of the hackathon I was already feeling the nerves of participating in the competition, especially due to the fact that the competition gave us only 5 days to complete our application. Once the competition started, I felt full of anxiety and frantic. Around the same time, my other classes increased their workload, which resulted with me experiencing even more stress. Due to this, the first day of the Hackathon went mostly to learning Socialize packages, which are packages for social interaction within Meteor applications. After hardly any progress was made, I realized that trying to learn these packages within the limited time frame and balancing my work for other classes was ineffecient and hurting my progress in other classes as well. The next day, our team decided to continue on with the project with what knowledge we had known. Although we were not able to complete the application that we envisioned for anime in the proposed time, we made much more progress within those last few days using what we had already known.
What I have learned from this experience is to develop better prioritization and communication skills. I believe that if we had started to do small implementations of functionailty from the first day, our group would have had more to present on the final day. Our team also ran into a lot of commit issues in Github, and I believe if I had provided better communication on what I was working on, we could have prevented such issues. I also realized that although I believe I have adequate time management skills, there is still room for improvement that I could work towards to become a better student and individual. Although this high-stress inducing experience, it is a valuable one that I will continue to use to improve myself.

Contribution and Approach

For this web application I was tasked with creating the Anime List page using the anime collection that my team mate had implemented into our application. I was also involved with researching and investigating the Meteor:Socialize packages, which unfortunately I was unable to figure out within the hackathon time frame. I was also tasked with implementing the profile picture upload functionality and bio when a new user is registering. This was done using the image hosting management service Cloudinary. Lastly, I used the information inputted by the user when registering and displayed it on the users My Profile page, allowing the user to view their information in a presentable format.
An image of the anime list in AniMoo, which included the title, image, summary, episodes, rating, and the ability to add the anime to favorites.