hackathon4us

💡Inspiration

In the past hackathons used to be in a format where a team of competitors clusters around a laptop screen; their table is decorated with snacks, caffeinated drinks, and scribbled Post-it notes. Stationed inside a large room with hundreds of other participants for 48 hours. The place will go buzzing and the energy was intense. This was a typical scene of hackathons. But COVID-19 came and everything went upside down. and everything went virtually. Zoom calls, discord chats, and hacking from bed became the new normal.

❓What it does

Hackathon4us is a place for a group of hackers to experience what they would have experienced if they were hacking in person. It's a place for them to walk and have a gamified experience by going to different rooms and hanging out.

⚙️How we built it

We used python to scrape the list of hackathons from ml.io/2023/events and then we populated our firestore database which is backing our web app. We then used Quasar and Phaser.js frameworks to create the gamified hackathon environment. We used the howler package to give us that soothing background music when we go to the web app. We also used auth0 to authenticate our users.

🎢Challenges we ran into

It was our first time working with Quasar and Phaser.js frameworks and because of that, we faced lots of bugs that took us quite a long time to figure out. The real-time database in firebase also gave us a bit of a challenge. The fact that our team members live in different countries(i.e. timezones), made it challenging to communicate well.

We had issues with video recording and we just recorded it with our phone

🚀Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were hacking from two different countries and everything was virtual, we wanted to create a hack that can help us have more experience. We have created a gamified web app with something we haven't worked on before. We were able to solve the bugs we haven't faced before.

📚What we learned

We have learned how to work with auth0, Quasar, and phaser.js. We have improved our collaboration and communication skills. Not only that we also learned new things about firebase that were introduced recently at the firebase summit.

🔜What's next for hackathon4us

This is just the beginning of hackathon4us. In the future, we are planning to add an integrated chat for team members and also a task management section where they can add todos and manage them in a gamified way.