INFO 5302 | Assignment 1 - Social Explorer

Frances Coronel (fc333)

Mengjiao Zhu (mz468)

CM Tech | March 14th 2017

GitHub Repository: github.com/fvcproductions/cmtech-assignment-1
OVERVIEW
Our goal of the application is to kindly remind people, especially those who are
immersed in their coding world, that the real world is constantly changing.

Even though we can become busy in our work, we should always keep being informed
and find out what is happening in our society.

To implement this function, we used GitHub API and The Guardian API.

Our endpoints would be

Github users
Time of Github users commits
Headlines from The Guardian

Our data scale

While we limited our scale to only the first page of commits the GitHub API gives
us, the app could potentially give us thousands of commits from the GitHub user.

Our app workflow

There are 3 main aspects to our app workflow:

1. User logins using their GitHub account

2. Users GitHub commits are parsed and the following data points are taken
a. commit message
b. commit timestamp
c. commit repo
3. For each of these commits, the timestamp is evaluated and matched with a
relevant Guardian headline
a. article headline
b. article url

In order to make the application work, we firstly need to get user to log in to their Github
accounts using oAuth, from which we could parse the time of their commits. Then we
could use these time information as a tie to get the headlines of news from The
Guardian. In this way, we use the headlines of news posted around users commit time to
represent the things happening around the world.

1
TECHNICAL METHODS
OAuth for GitHub using Firebase
HTML/CSS/JS
Materialize CSS

SUMMARY OUTPUT
The app displays the users commits with a relevant headline taken from Guardian news
that most closely matches to when that commit was made.

Heres a screenshot taken from 5 different GitHub users.

The first GitHub user is Frances, the second GitHub user is Cornell Tech and the other 3
represent some of the top contributors on GitHub.

If you would like to see how an entire response looks like (very long screen), please view
an example here.

Notice the different headlines/commit dates.

User @fvcproductions

2
User @josh

User @andrew (contributes a lot to librariesio)

3
User @feross

User @cornell-tech

4
APP DEMO
You are welcome to fiddle with the app via GitHub pages but please let it be noted that
we were only able to get it to work for a certain user and even though a user can login
through GitHub, the app is not able to get the logged in users commits.