dereference.tech

A decentralized reference for developers.

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Inspiration

We wanted to create a decentralized Q&A website like StackOverflow that would incentivize professional developers to answer questions.

What it does

dereferenced.tech is a Q and A website that allows anyone to post a programming question and put a bounty on it. Professional developers can then answer the question and receive the bounty in DeSo. Additionally, developers can set a bunch of subjects they're experts in and also a minimum bounty size. If a question is posted with that subject and at least that bounty, they will receive a text message about the new post, inviting them to answer it.

How we built it

We built our website using Next.js and services from Google Cloud (Functions and Firestore), Twilio, DeSo, and Auth0.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble using the API's for DeSo and managing the transactions, as well as implementing Twilio to message users. It was initially confusing trying to parse through DeSo's documentation, since they had two websites (Developer Hub and just the regular docs) that, although not immediately obvious, were actually documenting two completely different things!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to implement an NLP subject extraction model to automatically text professional programmers and alert them of a question that is in their area of expertise. We also successfully automated bounty transactions using DeSo.

What we learned

This was our first time working with DeSo and decentralized technologies at first so it was very daunting! We learned a lot about how the blockchain works and how to use various APIs like Auth0 and Twilio.

What's next for dereference.tech

We plan on expanding our website further by adding new features such as an upvote button. Also, we want to improve the the ML model that analyzes the subject of the post.

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