DevDuels

Inspiration:

Millions of active software developers use GitHub for managing their software development, however, our team believes that there is a lack of incentive and engagement factor within the platform. As users on GitHub, we are aware of this problem and want to apply a twist that can open doors to a new innovative experience. In addition, we were having thoughts on how we could make GitHub more accessible such as looking into language barriers which we ultimately believed wouldn't be that useful and creative. Our offical final project was inspired by how we would apply something to GitHub but instead llooking into youth going into CS. Combining these ideas together, our team ended up coming up with the idea of DevDuels.

What It Does:

Introducing DevDuels! A video game located on a website that's goal is making GitHub more entertaining to users. One of our target audiences is the rising younger generation that may struggle with learning to code or enter the coding world due to complications such as lack of motivation or lack of resources found. Keeping in mind the high rate of video gamers in the youth, we created a game that hopes to introduce users to the world of coding (how to improve, open sources, troubleshooting) with a competitive aspect leaving users wanting to use our website beyond the first time. We've applied this to our 3 major features which include our immediate AI feedback to code, Duo Battles, and leaderboard.

In more depth about our features, our AI feedback looks at the given code and analyses it. Very shortly after, it provides a rating out of 10 and comments on what it's good and bad about the code such as the code syntax and conventions.

How We Built It:

The web app is built using Next.js as the framework. HTML, Tailwind CSS, and JS were the main languages used in the project’s production. We used MongoDB in order to store information such as the user account info, scores, and commits which were pulled from the Github API using octokit. Langchain API was utilised in order to help rate the commit code that users sent to the website while also providing its rationale for said rankings.

Challenges We Ran Into

The first roadblock our team experienced occurred during ideation. Though we generated multiple problem-solution ideas, our main issue was that the ideas either were too common in hackathons, had little ‘wow’ factor that could captivate judges, or were simply too difficult to implement given the time allotted and team member skillset.

While working on the project in specific, we struggled a lot with getting MongoDB to work alongside the other technologies we wished to utilise (Lanchain, Github API). The frequent problems with getting the backend to work quickly diminished team morale as well. Despite these shortcomings, we consistently worked on our project down to the last minute to produce this final result.

Accomplishments that We're Proud of:

Our proudest accomplishment is being able to produce a functional game following the ideas we’ve brainstormed. When we were building this project, the more we coded, the less optimistic we got in completing it. This was largely attributed to the sheer amount of error messages and lack of progression we were observing for an extended period of time. Our team was incredibly lucky to have members with such high perseverance which allowed us to continue working on, resolving issues and rewriting code until features worked as intended.

What We Learned:

DevDuels was the first step into the world hackathons for many of our team members. As such, there was so much learning throughout this project’s production. During the design and ideation process, our members learned a lot about website UI design and Figma. Additionally, we learned HTML, CSS, and JS (Next.js) in building the web app itself. Some members learned APIs such as Langchain while others explored Github API (octokit). All the new hackers navigated the Github website and Git itself (push, pull, merch, branch , etc.)

What's Next for DevDuels:

DevDuels has a lot of potential to grow and make it more engaging for users. This can be through more additional features added to the game such as weekly / daily goals that users can complete, ability to create accounts, and advance from just a pair connecting with one another in Duo Battles. Within these 36 hours, we worked hard to work on the main features we believed were the best. These features can be improved with more time and thought put into it. There can be small to large changes ranging from configuring our backend and fixing our user interface.