Hacker Discovery

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  Hacker Discovery image inside Devpost website. Includes first and second degree contacts

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  Updated profile with "Manage social networks" option and already configured networks.

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  Hacker Discovery thumbnail

Inspiration

I'm an introvert

And while some hackathons provide a space to meet people, it would be much easier if I could easily find hackers I already know! It's usually hard to approach people about hackathons in friends circles, university, or work. But what if someone else in my circle is in the same position as me? We need to know.

What it does

"Hacker Discovery" aims to help address one of Devpost's pillars: "Grow your network". By leveraging the existing APIs in all the social login platforms supported, we can easily cross-reference users already registered in Devpost, or even invite them! Once connected, all the tools are already in place for following each other, sharing past projects, and building new teams for upcoming hackathons.

How can it be built

The best part of this idea is that all the required dependencies are already available.

Data ingestion

Apart from just email, currently, Devpost supports social login with Github, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. All these sites provide APIs to retrieve information related to the user's network:

• Github API: List followers of the authenticated user
• Facebook Graph API: Retrieve user friends
• Google People API: Read contacts
• LinkedIn - Microsoft Contacts API: Retrieve address book

While only one of the sites can be chosen a login method, allowing the user to set up other social sites will improve Hacker Discovery searches and suggestions.

Graph representation

Here is a fun opportunity for Devpost engineers to model a rich graph. Each user needs to be linked with its identities across the registered profiles.

Search and discovery

Once the graph is built, Devpost should be able to easily suggest other registered hackers that are part of your circles (such as Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts). There are multiple product decisions to be made at this point, but one of the main ones is asking users if they effectively want to be discovered: let's keep in mind that the key purpose of social login is to, well, log in. Being searched should be, in my opinion, an opt-in feature.

What's next for Hacker Discovery

Let's build this thing. Integrations are fun! Oh, there might also be some legal details I'm intentionally leaving outside of the slicing.

Built With

• css3
• html5
• miro