HackHub

Note This is a create project

This project was created during HackIllinois 2017, by a group of three including myself, Thomas Huang, and Anton Yang.

You can find the prototype of HackHub here.

HackHub is a open source project that specifically targets hackathons. HackHub aims to ease the burdens of mentors and company representatives at hackathons, by providing a platform online to facilitate communication between hackers and mentors (we will include company representatives in this category) simply and elegantly. Besides forum style Q&A, HackHub also provides functionality such as making announcements and arranging meetings. We included a prototype demonstrating the basic functionalities of our product. We built this platform using web technologies, namely HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We are using Firebase as a backend, because of its simplicity and real-time updates.

We understand that hackathons have different requirements and style choices, so we have made the code base very easy to extend. We highly encourage hackathons to not only fork this repo and tweak our code for their own needs, but also to help extend the project for future hackathons. We will now go into details on HackHub.

Usage

Our prototype provides simple user authentication using Firebase. Users sign up and log in with their emails and their passwords.

After the users are logged in, they are brought to the home screen. The home screen shows all of the messages that are on the hackathon's feed, which includes any questions, announcements, or meeting arrangements. Next to the home screen are the announcements page, the meetings page, the user page, and a logout button. The pages filter out messages that do not belong in the category, and only display messages that do. For example, the user page only shows messages that correlate to the user in some way.

Moving on to the messages. Every message is added by some user, either a hacker or a mentor. Users have the choice to include which title and content they want, the type of message, and any tags that they want. Types of messages correspond to which tab they will belong to on the website. Tags basically let users target who they want to see the messages. If a user tags HackHub, then HackHub representatives would see the user on their user page and be more likely to help the user. Users also have the ability to delete messages, which removes the messages permanently.

Clicking on the messages will bring up a more detailed page for the specific message. This will also bring up a comment section, which is where mentors would help hackers. This allows mentors to help hackers over long distances.

Build Instructions

HackHub is a web based platform, so hosting this repo on a server is the first step. Simply clone this repo and host it online. Firebase also needs to initialized with credentials, so the following code in firebase_init.js must be edited:

(function() {
    var config = {
    apiKey: "AIzaSyDFoH-LzsCuQzND-_74g0EA4BpYZN10tKM",
    authDomain: "hackhub-255d7.firebaseapp.com",
    databaseURL: "https://hackhub-255d7.firebaseio.com",
    storageBucket: "hackhub-255d7.appspot.com",
    messagingSenderId: "157801572889"
    };
    firebase.initializeApp(config);
}());

These credentials can be obtained simply by registering an account and project on Firebase.

Now that the server is set up, the product can already be used. It can also be tweaked to better fit the user's needs. Tweaking HackHub is simple. Since our CSS is compiled with SASS using Compass, almost all of the values used are stored in variables in the _globals.scss file. Tweaking HackHub is as simple as changing the variables in the file. For example, to change the navigation bar color, change the $nav_bar variable to something like:

$nav_bar: #ff9900;

To compile SASS, install Compass first, and then in the root directory of this project run:

compass watch

Now your changes will cause Compass to compile your SASS directory on save.

Contributors Guide

List of contributors

Due to the short nature of hackathons and too much junk food, our quality of the code may be lacking in certain areas. We will try our best to maintain HackHub, so contributions are very welcome. We welcome contributions in any form, but value bug fixes the most. See Known Issues and Possible Extensions for more ideas.

See how to contribute here

Known Issues

We will compile a list of known issues in the issue tracker.

Possible Extensions

Maps could be included to make meetings easier to locate.
Filter options for the user to re-order messages on the home screen.
Pinned notifications that act as a constant reminder.
Queue of hackers waiting for a certain mentor, to make it easier for mentors to find who to help next.
Efficiency could be a problem if the hackathon is large-scaled.