UCOSP Blog - Formulize

This semester, I had the privilege of participating in the UCOSP program. The program consisted of a code sprint that we got to do in Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, then coding remotely from our respective locations.

We were sent to Facebook HQ for 3 days as part of a code sprint/first team meeting/hackathon. They liked using the word ‘hack’, which apparently is the thing to do down there. The food was great (and free), the hotel was pretty great, and a lot of us UCOSPers bonded every night with whisky and excursions into Palo Alto.

The project I worked on was called Formulize, a tool made for an advanced amateur computer user to create a full-fledged custom data gathering/reporting tool, using correct SQL tables. Formulize was to be able to do all this using just the GUI.

When I first saw the project, I admit I had some mixed feelings. The code-base was old compared to all the other projects I’ve worked on, and it maybe lacked the sex appeal of other projects in UCOSP, but I immediately saw it’s power and worth when I tried an installation by myself. It was very customizable, and while it could be a bit user-friendlier, I was quickly able to do some interesting things with it that would have taken me a much longer time to make from scratch. I immediately understood the value of this software and how it could really help their target audience, non-profits.

At the code sprint, our mentor, Julian Egelstaff, did a wonderful job of walking us through the PHP we needed to have and describe the project itself. He also broke down the tasks very nicely and let us choose what to do. We had some great coordination at the sprint, but the real challenge is continuing that coordination after.

I worked on the Joomla Extension with Julie, another team member who knew a great amount about Joomla already. Our goal was to embed formulize’s abilities into a Joomla installation. Even though I’ve done a lot of programming projects before hand, I have to admit working with Joomla was an daunting challenge. The documentation was often misleading and it was difficult to get what we wanted on the screen from the very beginning.

First of all, the way Joomla did extensions was weird. For our desired functionality, we had to create two separate extensions to achieve what we want. A component for creating the controls needed for formulize to appear, and a plugin to do a Just-In-Time sync with Joomla and formulize. With the plugin, any time users or groups are edited.

We did manage to finish the two plugins, with a lot of help from the other members of the team, especially Braeden who made a great API for us to interface with formulize with.

The greatest difficulties of this project for me personally were the environmental problems I would run into. I’m not that great with the LAMP stack, though it’s straightforward enough, and often I would run into errors while installing the different components of formulize, Joomla, our plugins and components, and the integration code. It was a difficult struggle to keep track of all of those in an unfamiliar environment, but in the end I feel that I learned a lot.

Another related difficulty I had was time-management. In the beginning of the eyar, it’s easy to go “I will work on this for 8 hours on Saturday.” Soon, you realize in a project like this, you need to be in communication with many different people who aren’t in the same work time as you. Therefore, when you get stuck, you really get stuck. My personal regret in these situations is that I should have just noted the problems, sent my emails, and gone on to try and make my product work. Instead, I let myself get hung up on problems others may solve very easily with their experience.