About Nebula Labs

Welcome to the Nebula Labs Confluence!

If you are interested in joining our organization and want to learn more about what we are about, this document is a great place to start!

What is Nebula Labs?

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

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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!

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.

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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

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

https://jupiter.utdnebula.com/

https://github.com/UTDNebula/jupiter

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS

UTD Trends is our data analytics platform to help students make informedย 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!

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https://trends.utdnebula.com/

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

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Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS

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.

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

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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

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Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Plasmo

If you are a big brain developer that likes back-end work, Nebula API/Platform Team is for you!

Here is a quick list of what the team does:

  • Maintain the largest dataset of university data on campus

  • Provide a public API for Nebula products and external developers

  • Serve as the identity management solution for all Nebula projects

Our goal is to help create the Nebula Labs ecosystem and to help the organization scale quickly. Discover a realm of possibilities with Nebula, where data integration meets streamlined authentication.

https://github.com/UTDNebula/nebula-api

Technologies: Golang, Gin, MongoDB

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

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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.

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Try Planner out to start planning your degree better today!

https://planner.utdnebula.com/

https://github.com/UTDNebula/planner

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

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 organizationโ€™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.

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Learn more about each division and their activities below!

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

Marketer

Marketers are in charge of spreading the word about Nebula Labs, driving people to use our products and join our organization ๐Ÿš€. Creating social media posts for Instagram and LinkedIn, planning events like all-hands and social, and booting at the SU are among the tasks assigned to Nebulaโ€™s marketing specialists. Marketers take innovation from the whole organization and spread it to the whole school.

We primarily use Figma and Canva to make posts/flyers.

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

Donโ€™t worry, this is super easy ๐Ÿ™‚ 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.

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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.

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Our matching process exists to put new recruits in the best environment for them to thrive and help build strong teams for project leads. From our experience last year, we realized that a laissez faire approach to recruitment led to uneven and volatile team sizes that also left many recruits feeling uninformed and left behind. We believe that this approach will help project leads find all the team members needed to build out their projects, as well as provide recruits with a better experience within the org.

Weekly Meetings

See our calendar for times and locations and our project governance for who will be running them.

Resources

Github: https://github.com/UTDNebula

This is where all of our code resides. Feel free to check out what we have! If youโ€™re up for it, you can also tackle any of the issues found on our Github issues page.

Discord: https://discord.utdnebula.com/

Website: https://www.utdnebula.com/