The Weekend Hack: 13-14 March, 2010

Inspired by this recent post over at Hacker News, I was itching for a fun weekend project.  My criteria for the project were the following:

• be small & well-defined- doable in a weekend
• produce something useful for someone
• give my rusty Google App Engine and GWT skills a workout

I use Wicket for my livelihood these days, but GWT is my true love. I miss working with it. 

So I decided to create a searchable database of Weight Watchers "food points" values.  Last year, the company that I was working for held weekly WW meetings in our lunch room.  For about 6 months it was all but impossible to avoid hearing "how many points for X?" type questions several times daily.

There are a lot of existing sites for this kind of thing, but I found the interfaces somewhat lacking (are we really still producing sites with MIDI soundtracks in 2010?)

Thus was born this weekend's project. At least until WW decides to shut it down. Here's the breakdown of where the time went:

• 2 hours brainstorming
• 4 hours getting Intellij, GWT and Google App Engine to all play nicely (this was the most painful part, really)
• 3 hours basic coding, page layout, getting the tabs to work
• 45 minutes with an Emacs macro converting HTML tables with food point values into a nice, CSV-style GWT properties file
• 2 hours playing around with font sizes and colors.  I'm still not 100% happy with this, but the project was time-limited by definition.
• 1/2 hour enabling AdSense, getting things to look relatively nice

A grand total of 260 lines of code.  GWT's SuggestBox made autocomplete so much easier than Wicket Extensions' AutoCompleteTextField, which I had to use recently.

The project is "done" in the sense that I am happy with it, and would feel content if I never spent another hour of time on it; that was part of my criteria for something doable in a weekend.  But that doesn't mean I'll never revisit it.

One potential idea is to make an iPhone-friendlier version of it, with some big calculator-style buttons right on the page to facilitate data entry.  I might come back to this idea in the future if the site analytics tell me it's worthwhile.  (As a side note, compared to the time and effort required to get an iPhone app of equivalent complexity published, this was a piece of cake.)

So, what fun projects are you working on?