Preliminaries of the Devcathlon

This week, our class was split into three groups to initialize the development of the Devcathlon.  For this first stage of the development, each group was given the chance to create a mockup of the how the user-interface would look for the Devcathlon. 

My group, consisting of Schellar Sanchez and John Ancheta, took many different approaches when going through of what a user of the Devcathlon might see.  Schellar and I used a possible page similar to Myspace for the user’s profile.  John also thought of using Yahoo Games way of creating matches between teams.  We all put our ideas together and came to terms of what the interface will be, dividing the pages to each member.

One of the pages I was charged with developing was the Team’s Page.  I thought of some ways to do this page, looking at how Myspace and Facebook designed their group pages and what options they gave to members of a group as examples. 

Each group also put the Devcathlon events to the test for this assignment, where we would rate ourselves.  The events we used for this round of the Devcathlon can be seen in this table:

Event	Points
Commit early	19
Commit regularly	19
Don't wait until the last minute	-5
Collective ownership	5
Provide issue ID in commit message	-1
Every member has an open issue	-3 (total)
Team meeting	20

Since no programming was involved, not all the events of the Devcathlon were put to practice on this round.  We came up with a total of 40 points, which isn't so bad.

Seeing that we got a head start with 20 points for an early commit, I sure hope we won.  Points wise, I think we won; but in the design walk-through of the site, maybe we have something other teams might like or might have missed.  In web designing, I noticed that a lot of the “wow” features comes from the CSS part of the webpage.  Unfortunately none of us in the group are web page programmers, but I say we did a descent job in designing the web pages.