FocusLab

What did you wish you had when you were studying?

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Inspiration

We're all beginners at hackathons and were inspired by the dozens of free products and sponsors provided to us for being student. We attempted to use as much as we could in the shortest period of time. Even though we did not reach our detailed plan of features, we were each able to implement MongoDB which we got our certificate on from the MongoDB University, used Postman to handle the API requests and loved how simple yet complex it can get, then MS Azure's free hosting server which we could not figure out in time to meet all our dependencies. This project made us all extremely excited to discover the products which adds a lot to our learning, and also many organizational problems to resolve before our next hackathons.

We chose to create a web app for taking notes in a simple but chaotic way as we like to do, some of us would just rather have sticky notes and notepads all around our setup. This makes it easier to do so online.

What it does

Currently our app can only let users add notes to the whiteboard, move, and delete them.

How we built it

We went for a MERN stack app using Vite and TypeScript, which we all had almost no knowledge with.

Challenges we ran into

  1. We were mostly unfamiliar with GitHub push and pull requests which caused us to lose a lot of time fixing each other's implanted issues
  2. The MS Azure server worked super well at the beginning until we needed to make post and get requests, this was late during the hackathon and we decided to drop it to be able to focus on functionality
  3. Since we are all beginners we were not aware that it is preferable to plan the project before the beginning of the hackathon
  4. Our time zones vary from 3 to 9 hours but this we were able to figure out by taking turns staying up late at night (which definitely bonded us)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We each planned to learn something interesting during the hackathon. Youssef got to experience further with React and react routing. John got to create a python OCR and implement it into Node which he was very happy of. Shane worked much on the backend and MongoDB as he wanted to deviate from the frontend and did much better than he thought, and I got to experiment with hosting on MS Azure which I wanted to do for a long time but was scared of all the options.

What we learned

  1. Many frameworks, libraries, and hosting services
  2. The caveats of not planning accordingly before the beginning of hackathons
  3. Learning is super fun when taking advantage of what's given access to us

What's next for FocusLab

We will definitely keep working on it this summer! We had way too many ideas that we can implement and we cannot let this learning experience go to nothing. Thank you for hosting this, we enjoyed every aspect and downfalls

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