What is Nebula Labs?

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Nebula Labs is an interdisciplinary group of 🎨 designers, 💻 engineers, and 📋 product managers who strive to improve our community by creating and maintaining software.

Mission 📈

• Build open-source software to help UTD students 🚀

• Cultivate a community for people to learn, grow, and thrive 💗

Motto: Products built by students for students

Projects 🚀

These are software products that Nebula Labs actively creates and maintains.

• Each project is run by a project lead

• Projects are supported by a small team of designers, engineers, and product managers

• Teams have weekly meetings to sync up, discuss the state of the project, and plan out future work

Find out more about our projects below!

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Tired of finding the same old clubs?

Jupiter is our solution to help students find student organizations that get them excited 🌟 . Our motivation for this product is create an improvement over Sharepoint by providing a clean, centralized, and cohesive experience to discover clubs for current UTD students.

Features (many of these are still a WIP 🚧 ):

• Search for new organizations on campus

• Find in-depth information for each club

• Find club events for any given week

Note: this is one of our newer projects, so working on Jupiter would be a great way to have a large impact 🔥

https://dev.jupiter.utdnebula.com/

https://github.com/UTDNebula/jupiter

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS

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Nebula Planner is an interactive degree planning tool that helps students plan their undergraduate degree.

Current features:

• Select courses for each semester through a delightful drag and drop experience

• Load in a four-year degree plan using our degree templates

• Verify your plan with our prerequisite and degree validation features

• Share your degree plan easily with your friends and advisor by exporting it as a PDF.

Try Planner out to start planning your degree better today!

https://planner.utdnebula.com/

https://github.com/UTDNebula/planner

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS, Flask, Neon, Umami

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Sick of having a bunch of tabs open during registration? 😔 Sk.edge is the tool for you!

Get all of your Rate My Professor and grade distribution data without ever leaving schedule planner! After winning at HackUTD IX, Sk.edge is now being maintained and developed by Nebula Labs. We can't wait to see how it changes course registration at UTD. 🚀

Watch a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5vlNmMtgk4

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sk-edge/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/skedge/ghipfanpcodcmkjacmmfjdmccdiaahab

https://github.com/UTDNebula/skedge/tree/main

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Plasmo

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UTD Trends is our data analytics platform to help students make informed decisions about their coursework. 📊

Features

• Find the grade distribution and RMP score for any given class 🤯

• Powerful query abilities that aggregates grade and RateMyProfessor data across several years to give you a more wholistic view of a specific course and professor

• Compare those statistics to averages across wider categories by using more general search terms

Compare multiple courses, professors, or categories on a single graph and reduce clutter on your browser!

https://trends.utdnebula.com/

https://github.com/UTDNebula/utd-trends

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS

Divisions 🌟

A division is a group of individuals that come together share knowledge, coordinate activities, and host events for their areas of expertise to further the organization’s mission. They also serve to set organizational standards for their discipline and provide a second layer of support for our project teams.

We currently have 4 divisions: design, engineering, product, and marketing.

Learn more about each division and their activities below!

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Our design division crafts delightful experiences across all Nebula products

Responsibilities:

1. Branding Blueprint: Frame style and branding directives for organization-wide adherence.

2. User Insights Integration: Synthesize user research for comprehensive product understanding and enhancement.

3. Designer Growth Facilitation: Cultivate growth opportunities for internal designers, nurturing their skill development.

Some division activities include holding design review sessions, performing usability testing, and conducting user research.

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Our engineering division develops the systems that power all the products within Nebula

Responsibilities:

1. Tech Standardization: Establish and ensure tech norms throughout the organization for consistent implementation.

2. Developer Education: Instruct developers in optimal practices for enhanced outcomes.

3. Engineer Support: Assist engineers by offering necessary resources and guidance for seamless operations.

Some division activities include holding code review sessions, hosting workshops about new technologies, and providing opportunities for mentorship.

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Our product division defines the direction of all our products in Nebula Labs

Responsibilities:

1. Product Identity Mastery: Grasp product essence and market positioning to steer marketing efforts effectively.

2. Innovative Feature Definition: Identify new features that resonate, enhancing product offerings.

3. Stakeholder Alignment: Foster consensus among cross-functional teams for unified marketing strategies and execution.

Some division activities include conducting market research, discuss new project features, and generating artifacts.

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The marketing division plays a pivotal role in driving our club’s visibility by showcasing our products and events.

Responsibilities:

1. Social Media Management: Curate content, engage users, and boost visibility through effective management of social media platforms.

2. Marketing Campaign Development: Craft impactful campaigns, merging research, creativity, and messaging for product and event promotion.

3. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Align timelines, goals, and strategies with other divisions, integrating marketing efforts cohesively.

Some division activities include managing our social media ecosystem, generating marketing campaigns for products, and working with projects to ensure alignment of timelines, objectives, and deliverables.

Roles

We currently have three main roles in Nebula Labs: designer, engineer, and product manager. We go into each of those roles below:

Designer

Designers are responsible for crafting and enhancing the user experience of a product from conception to execution 🎨 They engage in tasks such as conducting user research to gather insights, sketching and prototyping design solutions, collaborating closely with cross-functional teams including engineers and marketers, and iterating on designs based on user feedback.

We primarily use Figma to design interfaces and Confluence for our documentation.

Engineer

Engineers are the literal builders of our visionary products, breathing life into concepts through lines of meticulously crafted code 🏗️ . Weekly, engineers collaborate seamlessly with the team, building new features, fixing bugs, and reviewing code to ensure we build high quality products, both at the technical and user level.

Here are some of the languages & technologies we use: TypeScript, React, NextJS, TailwindCSS, MongoDB, Postgres (w/ Neon), Python, Flask, Golang, Gin, MongoDB

Product Manager

Product Managers are the strategic visionaries who steer the entire product journey from inception to success 🗺️ . They're immersed in market analysis, user feedback, and business insights to shape a product's roadmap. Collaborating adeptly with designers, engineers, and stakeholders, they synthesize these inputs into actionable plans, ensuring seamless coordination to deliver exceptional features, prioritize enhancements, and refine the user experience, all while keeping an eagle eye on the big picture of the product's overall success.

How to get Involved

Don’t worry, this is super easy 🙂 Start by attending our weekly project meetings to get a better sense on what we do on a week-to-week basis. We encourage all new recruits to attend at least two project meetings (preferably for different projects) and optionally one division meeting.

After you have attended your second project meeting, ask your project lead for an interest form and fill that out! From there, we will do our best to match you onto a project.

Weekly Meetings

Resources

Github: https://github.com/UTDNebula

This is where all of our code resides. Feel free to check out what we have! If you’re up for it, you can also tackle any of the issues found on our Github issues page.Visit the new about us page for the most up to date info: https://nebula-labs.atlassian.net/wiki/x/0YD5AQ