Learn about the HackRU Research and Development Team

• Overview
• Basics
• Recruiting/Registration
• Development
• Maintenance
• Unrelated HackRU Projects
• Post HackRU Duties
• Timeline

Our mission is to improve the overall hackathon experience by providing software to the community.

In addition, we do not limit ourselves to HackRU: we hope to provide software that would aid all aspects of any Rutgers community.

Our team consists of developers we call architects. We hope that a team of architects, creating a project team, can see a project from its inception to its delivery and into its maintenance.

Project Teams consist of multiple roles:

• Project Leads
• Architects
• Alumni Mentors

We accept all project ideas for further research, from any community though we may have to prioritize HackRU projects.

This team’s timeline many not align with that of HackRU. Projects may last over a semester and maintenance will certainly outlast many HackRUs as we hope projects will last.

We will urge them to attend other hackathons and hope that the projects they partake in and community impact they generate will provide incentive for their participation.

In order to be an architect, any Rutgers student must fill out a brief form with their email and GitHub handle including short paragraphs on their interest in hackathons.

After this, we will email any applicant an interview question which will test their coding skill and their ability to design a larger project. The code we ask of them will not be conceptually difficult, but will include the implementation of a working, testable, and non-trivial program. We will also ask them for a design for a larger application to test their ability to create fuller user-experiences.

We will always follow up with 4-6 questions about their implementation and design in order to ensure that they understand the concepts they used and that they put in thought behind their code and design.

After this, the architect will be paired with a project. Though we prefer that they focus on one project, they can certainly share ideas for any project.

We will strongly urge architects to be involved in the CS community at Rutgers. Among various things, we will urge them to volunteer at HackRU as architects are well-qualified to be mentors or sit at the help desk.

We hope to use GitHub for most of the development. GitHub will, through the HackRU organization and its project maintenance system, provide a lot of the structure to the projects, allowing alumni and other people who are not regularly at meetings to contribute.

Internal communications will also be managed through the team slack (with a channel for each project). This way, people can keep messages organized by project and share smaller files while keeping information accessible to the directors and any interested architects or HackRU organizers.

For development, we hope to be agnostic in the tools we use. We hope to use tools that would require the least maintenance and have the highest efficiency. We hope to use the correct tool every time to make all projects run smoothly. As a result, we also expect Architects to learn as needed and not be too heavily biased towards familiar tools.

We hope to maintain deadlines with the community that we are in contact with. If we are developing for HackRU we will maintain deadlines with the relevant fellow directors.

In general, we hope to reduce the overhead of maintenance by insisting on thorough documentation, perhaps even mandating it as a part of each project.

We will be thorough about maintaining our projects as external tools and needs develop. We will maintain relations with the communities we have helped in order to maintain the solutions we have provided them.

We hope to include projects not related to HackRU or even the hacking community. We hope to accept projects from any part of Rutgers.

This initiative is actively being explored and hopefully will kickstart after the HackRU related projects are more developed.

We do not intend to categorize duties as pre vs. post or even “during” HackRU duties. Project development will continue regardless of HackRU’s timeline - especially for unrelated projects. (Related projects will abide by a generally pre-HackRU timeline.)

In general, we hope that projects will be developed quickly. That is approximately all that can be said about project-based timelines as projects may vary in magnitude.

We hope to recruit whenever we feel a shortage of architects. We will recruit as needed and hopefully avoid strenuous times in the semesters (that is, the times of midterms and finals), aiming for the first few or middle weeks of the semester.