Inspiration
With the current global pandemic and the lack of a contact tracing application for individuals to keep track of who they come in contact with, we thought it would be useful to develop.
What it does
HackyStack is a website that allows you to do Covid-19 contact-tracking!
How we built it
The backend is written with Node.js and the frontend is vanilla javascript. The front end is implemented with Bootstrap and uses sigma.js as the graph drawing utility. This project uses the Socket.io framework as its networking framework. For data storage, we use SQLite3 with a local database. In order to implement the graph data structure in our relational database, we simply have two tables, one that keeps track of the nodes while the other keeps track of the edges.
Challenges we ran into
The first major roadblock that we ran into was in our choice of database management software. At the very beginning, we decided to use MariaDB, however, that gave us several major issues ranging from not being able to have our application connect to it to not having the ability to have a common database for testing between each other. In order to resolve this issue, we switched to SQLite to manage our database. This system allowed us to store the database as several files in the /db directory keep a consistent database between everyone.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
First off, we're all very proud that we were able to pull off this in the 24 hour time period. However, I think the technical part that we are most proud of was the seamless integration of our frontend and backend. We designed our backend to accept very simple API calls so that the frontend would need minimal work to get information from the database. As a whole, this modularity allowed us to work on the frontend and backend as two separate entities which made the process far streamlined for development.
What we learned
We learned that sometimes that our first ideas aren't always the best and that it can be necessary to stop and reevaluate our situation rather than give in to the sunk cost fallacy.
What's next for HackyStack
We're looking forward to working together and collaborating on more hackathons and CTF events together. In the future, we are looking to add user accounts and profiles and have a way to allow users to connect with each other.
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