View Source

Overall Visions

Priority #1: Increase Notangles active user count by %, i.e. to be the planner for UNSW students
- 99.999% uptime
- Accurate up to date data within 24 hours
- Promotional content
- Bye bye Cr**sAngles
- Take feedback!
Priority #2: Social planning features
- Ties in w/ priority 1
Create a team where members feel welcomed and empowered to enhance their technical skills whilst forming relationships with others

Principles

A supportive environment that embraces everyone’s technical skill cap
- All members can contribute
- Directors help provide feedback and support throughout members' learning journey
- Constantly learning
We would want a judgment-free zone that celebrates the differences within the subcommittee
- Diverse group
- Very social and collaborative
- Ensure everyone is included in conversations (in-person and online)

Project Features/Tasks

Scraper
- More robust
  - Works without issues and without need of human intervention
    - resolve issue with db pod dying
- Automated
  - Notify team when fails
  - runs once a fortnight
- Transparent - need to be able to debug failed runs
Promotion
- SEO (why is Cr**sAngles the first result for UNSW timetable planner?)
- Posters
- Social media posts
- Shill Notangles hard @ O-week and leverage Marketing
- User Push Notifications
  - Census dates
  - Enrollment dates
  - Notangles updates
UI
- More onboarding and promotion of SSO and new functionality
  - tooltips, modals, tutorials, etc
- Investigate improving drag and drop experience
- fix nitpick bug: add in a 8pm slot at the bottom of calendar
Social Timetabling
- Add friends
- See which courses your friends are taking
- Share timetables with friends
  - public/private (show classes or busy/on-campus/off-campus?)
- “Friends activity” functionality from 2024 offboarding presentation
- Society/group events
  - Feed
Side Projects
- Integration - can we tie-in with Circles, Freerooms, or even myUNSW?
- Mobile experience
- Export to iCal URL (for calendar sync)
- Integrate with other universities
  - UTS has expressed interest - need to investigate working with Allocate+

Achieve by end of the following Term

Goal

T1

New Features:

finalise social timetabling features and begin preparations for release
finalise SSO features and release
- deadline for release - before T2 begins

Refactoring:

maintain the scraper and data accuracy
create a way for users to report bugs or provide feedback (similar to Circles where they have the feedback)

Subcommittee:

onboard and members gradually becoming more familiar with codebase
subcom understands the purpose of Notangles, our goals, and our expectations
- brainstorm as a team the future subcom envisions for Notangles and determine whether we would want to be flexible and steer in some other direction on top of our 2 main priorities
bonding event(s) taken place at least once after induction and before t2 to strengthen team connection and morale

T2

New Features:

deadline for social timetabling release: T2 week 6 Friday

Refactoring:

data remains accurate and all bugs are tended to in a timely manner (no more than a 3 week resolution window)

Subcommittee:

members have fun participating in meetings & bonding activities whilst consistently contributing to the work
- Notangles Melbourne trip?? (in t2 holidays??)

T3

New Features:

focus on maintaining app stability and data accuracy
play catchup on any unreleased features

Refactoring:

ensure all changes have been documented well in preparation for 2025-2026 handover and outduction

Subcommittee:

have last few bonding activities to make lasting memories of Notangles subcom!!

Goals for Leading Subcommittee

Culture
- Historically, Notangles has been well known for its bonding events
- Work hard, play hard
  - Studies and mental health comes first
- Dedicated team bonding 3 times a term
  - Before flex week
  - During flex week
  - After
  - One online, two in person?
    - Discuss activities/preferences w/ subcom
Deadlines
- Moderately paced deadlines
- Deadlines should be reasonable, but have some flexibility - this needs to be built in
  - Subcom members should be comfortable to give honest progress updates - it’s ok to miss a deadline, but it’s not ok to not tell anyone that you can’t hit a deadline
- Critical dates are enrollment T1, T2, T3
  - Functionality during these critical windows is more important than any feature rollout
Meetings
- Weekly meetings, primarily in-person (may offer hybrid meetings if needed term-to-term)
  - Meetings are progress updates and dev sessions - should make progress, but talking, socialising, music etc is ok
    - Good time to pair code, collaborate, discuss changes, and ask for help to be unblocked
  - Dinner/social event before/after most meetings - team bonding is important, encourages in-person attendance
  - Minimum expectation of attendance and contribution - attendance during meetings and bonding events is more important than async code contribution
- Fortnightly checkups
  - Try async for the first term
Celebrations for when members complete features or tickets
- DevSoc Internals-wide shout-outs to motivate members of their impact
- Celebratory occasion (e.g. night out, or can save it for next bonding event)
Code Practices
- Linear (no merge commits )
- Squash and merge
- Strict CI + review process
- Enforce best practice Git commits (both size and messages/descriptions)
- Try to keep issues/PRs small and constantly merged back to dev/staging
  - good guideline is no more than 25 files should be changed per PR
  - We do not want a 331-staging incident
- More pair programming during meetings
- Encourage code ownership - allow members to specialise