Quark '08 and Natasha

Its been a while.......

College ain't simple.. at least in Year 2 Sem 2......

Lotsa things to do.... reports... n assignments.... n projects..... hardly any time....

Waves '08 is here... and thankfully it gives me a bubble of time to breathe and live for myself instead of my CGPA (which keeps falling down no matter how hard you try to bring it up)

Its about time I wrote something to polish my non-existent English writing skills so here I go...

Many people have written various articles about Quark '08 so I'll make mine a little different and write about my contribution rather than Quark '08 in general

Quark is our college tech fest....

This year we wanted to make it legendary so the preparations had begun well in advance......

The organising committee this year had analysed the drawbacks and problems which had occurred at Quark last year and intended to make this year's Quark smooth and problem free....


Rewind to the beginning of Year 2 Sem 1

I had been for some while tried to learn PHP (its a language used to make dynamic web pages) following which I had made some simple web pages and a couple of small projects.....

Theres another friend into web development, I'll call him Han here (I just don't like to put down names in a public place). He's done a couple of good projects in PHP, Javascript, AJAX, CSS etc etc (Yeah I know its greek.... It's Greek to me too....)

Seeing our interest in the field, we were contacted by the CO of Quark '08 and asked to make an Content Management software (alike Joomla... if u dunno what Joomla is... plz Google it)

The CO being a really good programmer himself, gave us some tips on the database structure, and how the various modules should be designed.....

We were jobless anyway, so we started work right away.

Since I possessed lesser skills than Han, we decided that I build the smaller modules and some bigger ones, and he does the rest of them and the most important part of design and putting them all together.....

So we started planning our modules one by one and coding them......

The nature of PHP (no debugging tools available, and not too many ready made modules) made my task a handful (coding for the same things over and over again isn't exactly enjoyable) This led to a loss of enthusiasm at many times... But we came back, taking a break for a couple of weeks whenever we thought it was getting too boring to code....

All this lasted for almost one semester...... Then began the part of putting it all together....... Designing and testing.....

Since our modules were coded from scratch and there was no prebuilt code used..... we knew our code inside out and so there weren't any (noticeable) bugs.....

Once the designing was done, we named it Natasha (I really dunno why... It was Han's idea, but I like the name anyway..... Reminds me of my days in school - only a few will know what I'm talking about).......

After showing it to the Info Man in charge.... and implementing other modules as necessary, we had a fully functional event management system ready......

We then integrated the registration data from the Internet web site of Quark, to give us a complete database of everything related to Quark.

Natasha was used at the main gate to register and give accommodation to all students who were visiting our campus during Quark.

Later, we had a plasma screen in the B-Dome which showed how many students had come in from outside the campus, which events were scheduled for the day, the status of the events, (based on the status set by the event managers) a scrolling marquee showing News at Quark '08
and also the cricket score......

All's well but however, all this took a little more time than we had expected to, so we had no time for all the Event Managers to get familiar with it...... leading to the old pen n paper method...... anyway..... at least the CS/IS event managers used Natasha and were quite pleased with the functionality...

We received some good feedback (most of it being - It's too complicated to use - Papad Rule in play, so it was pretty obvious)

Well, atleast people now know that something like Natasha existed, and in all probability will be used next year too.... so they'll learn to use it well before...

However, I'm bored of web development (I'm more of a programmer than a designer) and I may not be fixing and coding Natasha next time, so I request anyone who is interested (seniors, juniors, anyone) to work on Natasha to contact me or Han... skills required will be any or all of PHP, Javascript, HTML, AJAX, CSS...

Even if you don't know any of the above, it all can be learnt in a matter of a few weeks of dedicated effort and willingness to learn......
I assure you working on Natasha will be a highly educational (and maybe entertaining) experience

Looking forward to the next Quark......

Cheers!!!