SlyDv was an itch-scratching project. At Grace Hopper, we saw — and gave — a lot of presentations where the speaker had to switch to a REPL to demonstrate some code, and then fumbled around to find the slides again afterward. We also saw a lot of people fussing more about their slide layouts than about the content itself. So we wanted to develop a presentation app that let you create vanilla slides using Markdown, and also make REPL slides that could be prepopulated with code and then live-edited and run while presenting.
In three weeks, we met these goals and also added a remote-control page that presenters can use on their phones, a style switcher for the slide decks, and a text chat interface for the audience and presenter to communicate through. And we used Deque Labs’s Cauldron library and jsx-a11y to help make the forms and controls accessible.
Team members
- India Amos
- Alice Chuang
- Georgina Hoagland
- Leigh Steiner
Key contributions
- Designed the application flow around slide editing
- Specified and designed the slide template types
- Built and styled the slide editing form
- Added confirmation popups to prevent accidental data loss, and tooltips to improve ease of use
- Set up descriptive page titles on each component to make it easier to use the browser’s back and forward buttons with this single-page application
- Evangelized for use of the Airbnb linter
- Kept our issue list up to date and comprehensible