One of the participants of Freeformers’ ‘Build an app in a day’ session (part of LSE Entrepreneurship‘s programme of events) shares their thoughts on the day.

The Freeformers session focussed on three things:

• teaching us about web apps and the internet
• showing us the practical skills to start building simple applications and how to teach ourselves everything else we need to know
• helping us develop our own application and website ideas

Part one was a beginners’ guide to how a web page is accessed and viewed over the internet. We also thought about some of the ways the mobile and tablet experience differed from browsing on a computer – very important considerations for a business delivering their content online. Whilst very interesting and well explained, Freeformers could see we were eager to get our hands dirty and start making websites.

After coming up with some launch event ideas we got to work making a simple single page event site. We made our sites on jsbin – where we could input HTML code (the site structure and content), CSS (the site style) and Javascript (the site ‘behaviour’ and interaction) and see a live preview of our page.

Rather than following a strict set of instructions, Freeformers showed us how to put our own ideas into practice by using resources and help online – in particular W3 Schools and Stack Overflow. They also emphasised the benefits of using plugins and templates that are already freely available. What’s the point in starting from scratch if the solution already exists? Particularly if you’re not very technical and just want to get a working version of your idea up and running as quickly as possible.

For the basic structure and style of the site we used the Bootstrap framework (which you can use like a template), then we used plugins from EventBrite, Facebook and Google Maps to create a booking system, comments and event map respectively. This was mostly just a case of pasting some code generated on these sites into our HTML or Javascript and occasionally looking up and fixing any glitches that cropped up.

The embedded map was the most technical things got as we used the Maps API (basically a way of one website sending commands and receiving data from another) to detect a user’s location and show the route on the map from them to the launch event. Really all we were doing was tweaking some example Javascript code but the end result was surprisingly impressive.

The final section of the day was for us to talk to each other about our app and online business ideas, and use our ideas to solve some of the problem areas given to us by Freeformers (things like ‘organisation’ and ‘money saving’). It was a really fun way to end the day and interesting to meet some people with similar ideas and ambitions. 

All in all it was a great balance of theoretical learning, hands on experience, networking. I left feeling very inspired!