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Goals for 2025

Goals for 2025

Owned by Mark Tran
Last updated: Dec 13, 2024
4 min read

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

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)

    • image-20241210-105603.png
      image-20241210-105615.png

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

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