HackerDash

The main dashboard
The main dashboard (but with the cool satellite view)
MLH news right in your Discord ;)
Never miss a mini-event again!
Using UIPath to automate webscraping like a pro
Make teams with ease

Inspiration

To commemorate the end of the MLH Summer League, we wanted to build something to help the hackers of the world, whether it be by helping them find hackathons, join a team or remind them to attend the mini-events during a hackathon. That's why we built HackerDash.

What it does

HackerDash comprises of a website and a discord bot. On the website, a list of upcoming hackathons are displayed, with the MLH news right beside it. The discord bot is nonetheless nifty, as it too can show the same information with the !hackathons and !news commands. Apart from that, the bot can also help you find a team using !lft, where you enter your timezone and your skills. It can also remind you to attend mini-events during the hackathon (true story, we were so busy hacking we missed the !Light event haha)

How we built it

We first scraped the list of hackathons and news using UIPath. We then built the website was built using vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, with the maps displayed using the Google Maps SDK. The discord bot uses the excellent discord.js library. We use ascii-tables for the nice tables and chrono-node for the natural language date parsing. Finally, we used the Google Compute Engine to host the discord bot.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was scraping the entire list of hackathons from Devpost using UIPath. This task was made particularly difficult because of the different date formats. Next we had trouble hosting the site on the domain till we figured out how to change DNS records, that was quite an interesting journey.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is the first time we used UIPath to automate data scraping from websites and so pretty proud of that. Also, even though this was a shorter 24hr hackathon, we managed time pretty well (this is in contrast to the last hackathon were we ran late and ended up rickrolling the judges xD)

What I learned

One word: UIPath. Made life so much more easier, definitely using this in the long-run. Previously we used to use a python script to data scraping, but UIPath has made it pretty simple now. We also learnt quite a lot on how to build Discord bots using the discord.js library. (Those fancy Ascii tables and embeds -> sweet).

What's next for HackerDash

We plan to upgrade the dashboard to show more details and include a search that allows you to search and filter certain categories. Once post-coronavirus, we can get the google map in the background to show the locations of where hackathons take place (this was our original intention for the Google Map xD)