WithU

Our mission is to connect people together, so that they don't have to vent out alone. With you forever.

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💡 Inspiration

It is as follows:

  1. Our inspiration was to create an all-in-one mental health hack that is easy to use and it has a clean UI. We wanted people, especially, students to use our application and confess everything they have.
  2. We also wanted to learn more about the Auth0 and DeSo.
  3. We ended up studying a lot of documentation of the Auth0 and included authentication based on that.
  4. We also studied about the Twilio API and we wanted to try it.

❤️ What it does

There are a lot of features in WithU. It is as follows:

  1. Authentication is done using DeSo or Auth0. You can go on the application and confess all your bottled up feelings. It is completely secure. We made sure that it has a proper IAM.
  2. There is a home page where you can add a confession with user likes and comments. Everything is stored on the CockroachDB cluster, which is in turn hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services)
  3. You can create, read, like and comment on confessions
  4. We included line graphs with value percentages to raise awareness about mental health.
  5. We also included pie charts with genders and community.

🔩 How we built it

1. Authentication Architecture

  1. Auth0 => Log in => Access the app => More about Auth0: Auth0 is an easy to implement, adaptable authentication and authorization platform. Whereas, Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure user authentication into applications, and for developers to build identity controls into applications, website web services and devices
  2. DeSo => Log in => Access the app (Data stored on the DeSo blockchain) More: Blockchains involve a lot of public key cryptography. This is because every interaction on a blockchain occurs on a peer-to-peer basis, without relying on some central authority such as in traditional Web2 applications. As a result, blockchains are based on communication models that eliminate trust from the equation and substitute it for the mathematical confidence of public key cryptography. In such systems, each user has a pair of public and private keys. Drawing an analogy from traditional infrastructures, public keys are like usernames, and private keys work similarly to passwords. Typically, integrating these cryptographic primitives into a web or mobile application would have required a significant software overhead and technical knowledge. However, we believe that building Web3 applications should be as simple as possible, and no more complicated than building apps on the centralized web. And so, we used the DeSo Identity service.

2. System Architecture

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  1. The app uses CockroachDB to perform CRUD operations on the confession page. It is hosted on Amazon Web Services.
  2. The app uses Node.js and Express.js to create API endpoints
  3. The app uses Chart.js, React.js and Bootstrap to create UI components.
  4. It also has a bonus feature on the About page (Twilio API :) )

3. Technology Architecture

CERN Stack :

  1. CockroachDB: CockroachDB is designed to survive software and hardware failures, from server restarts to datacenter outages. This is accomplished without confusing artifacts typical of other distributed systems (e.g., stale reads) using strongly-consistent replication as well as automated repair after failures.
  2. Express.js: Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.
  3. React.js: React · Declarative. React makes it painless to create interactive UIs. · Component-Based. Build encapsulated components that manage their own state, then compose web apps
  4. Node.j: Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on the V8 engine and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser.

Front-end:

ReactJavaScriptChart.jsReact RouterHTML5 CSS3BootstrapFigmaCanva

Back-end:

PostgreSQLAuth0NodeJS Express.jsSequelizeAWSMySQLDeSoJSON

Development

GitHubPostmanNodemonJestWebRTCnpm

😠 Challenges we ran into

  1. Integrating Auth0 required a lot of research. Auth0 is a flexible, drop-in solution to add authentication and authorization services to your applications. Your team and organization can avoid the cost, time, and risk that come with building your own solution to authenticate and authorize users
  2. Integrating Twilio also turned out to be a big challenge. We were always getting CORS error. (It was annoying :( )

🎁 Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. UI can be a huge differentiator when it comes to winning customers and fending off the competition. We ended up making a clean UI that is very simple to use.
  2. Blockchain, as the backbone of the Web3, redefines the data structures in the backend of the Web, now that we live in a connected world. It introduces a governance layer that runs on top of the current Internet, that allows for two people who do not know or trust each other to reach and settle agreements over the Web. We ended up integrating Web3 and Blockchain Technology in our app

📚 What we learned

technologies

  1. We pushed ourselves to the test to learn more about relational database technologies (PostgresQL). We learned the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) Lifecycle. In computer programming, create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) are the four basic operations of persistent storage. CRUD is also sometimes used to describe user interface conventions that facilitate viewing, searching, and changing information using computer-based forms and reports.
  2. A SQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modelled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. We learned building PostgresQL Schemas for CockroachDB.
  3. Validation is an automatic computer check to ensure that the data entered is sensible and reasonable. It does not check the accuracy of data. We also learned CockroachDB Validation.

↗️ What's next for WithU

  1. To have a properly function IoT channel that can be used to communicate stress levels
  2. To have more features to help students going through impostor syndrome
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