SlugLoop.
the crewfour students

Four engineers, one campus problem, one shared repo.

SlugLoop was built end-to-end by four UCSC Baskin Engineering students. Roles drew themselves around skill: product and full-stack lead, backend and data pipeline, frontend and UX, hardware and embedded. Everyone touched something they hadn’t before.

↓ taped to the corkboard, in no particular order.

Bill Zhang
bill zhang

// Product, full-stack development, and project leadership

kept the whole stack stitched together. the one who decided the project would actually ship.
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Alex Liu
alex liu

// Backend, data pipeline, and frontend development

lived in the firestore docs. wrote the express ingestion that turned bus pings into pixels.
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Annie Liu
annie liu

// Frontend, UI/UX, and product experience

made the map look like something a student would actually open between classes.
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Nicholas Szwed
nicholas szwed

// Backend, hardware, and embedded systems

reprogrammed gps units already on the buses. wrangled basestations with libcurl and patience.
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acknowledgments

// built with help from

A small village.

We didn’t do this alone. The honest list:

  • A Baskin Engineering professor who said "yes, you can touch the hardware."
  • Whoever installed the original GPS units on the loop fleet years ago.
  • UCSC IT staff who let four students near the basestations on the rooftops.
  • CruzHacks 2023 organizers and judges.
  • The r/UCSC posters whose frustration framed the spec.
  • Every beta tester who refreshed the map in the rain.

// made with

Receipts.

A loosely accurate inventory of what actually got the project shipped.

  • 01.<too many> cups of coffee from McHenry
  • 02.one (1) printer/scanner stolen from the lab for screenshots
  • 03.a dorm room couch in Crown
  • 04.github commits at 4 am
  • 05.cruzhacks pizza, cold by hour 12
  • 06.a lot of slack messages with "is this working??"

want to read what we shipped?

The field logOpen the mapSource code