Second-year Computer Science at the University of Birmingham has a team project module: groups of seven, each building a web app over the semester. Ours is StudySea, and today we handed it in. It’s live at studysea.live.

It’s a study app built on the Pomodoro technique: study for a block, take a short break, repeat. The idea is that you do it with friends. Everyone in a session shares one timer, and the chat only opens on the breaks. During the study blocks, all you get is a countdown.

Each of us owned part of it. Mine was the feed, where you post about your studying and your friends can like and comment, and saving each study session once it’s over. I also built the settings pages and looked after the database and its migrations. I got the hang of Angular before the rest of the team, so I made the shared components everyone else built their pages from.

We didn’t choose the stack. Every team had to use JHipster unless they could make a good enough case for something else, and none of us knew enough yet to make one: in our own meeting notes, no one had “any ideas/preferences to the contrary”. It generated a huge, working app for us on day one, which was great, until we needed to change anything. Every change to the database goes through Liquibase, and our meeting notes from April have us, officially, moaning about it. One commit from then is titled “extremely cursed database changes”: 187 files and 13,084 lines added. The pipeline passed.

I ended up writing a JHipster guide for the team, which people in other teams used too. My notes on deleting a single table come to thirteen rm -rf commands and two files to edit by hand. I still don’t really know what Maven is, or what most of the generated files are for. I just know ./mvnw makes it go.

When you join a friend’s session, your countdown lands on the same second as theirs. A session only keeps the time it started, and the app works out from that which block everyone’s on.

Yesterday we spent the evening filming the demo video, then filmed parts of it again to make it shorter. Today we closed every issue on GitLab and submitted. The last action in our meeting diary reads: “Get a good mark on M3!”

This has been the most fun I’ve had on a project. We worked so hard on it, meeting up every day or two to code together in whatever lecture room or hall was free, and I’m going to miss that.

The project page has how it was made.