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Viewing a users contributions on the web.
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Posting a sticker to Snapchat.
Inspiration
We wanted to help people get involved with open source projects. We have often felt overwhelmed by massive open source projects. We believe that by adding elements of gamification and social interaction, it will help other developers have a place to start and build from in the open source community.
What it does
Git Social brings social gamification to open source: share contributions, earn badges, and raise on the leader board. Users can create an account, linking their GitHub, and then can use both the Web App and Mobile App to view their contributions. Users can also search for other contributions and be linked to them through others sharing on social media. Our app allows sharing a users contributions and earned badges to SnapChat as stickers that can be attached to images.
With this approach of adding a social aspect to a productive platform. We hope to encourage open source development and sharing of technical accomplishments.
How we built it
We developed a Django API on a Google Cloud Kubernetes which allows us to make queries through GitHub about how much users have contributed to specific repos. The Django app also serves a web app version of our website where users can create accounts and view others contributions. We developed an Android app using react native which users can view and share their GitHub contributions through. The app uses Snapchat's Snap Kit Creative to send stickers to Snapchat.
Challenges we ran into
When we started the project, we were enthusiastic about using the Snapchat API. However, we immediately ran into problems bridging the code we needed from the API and our Android code in React Native. With some hard work and time, we were able to overcome this and implement the features we wanted. We also faced trouble at the beginning of the project while we were learning how to utilize Google's Kubernetes engine. However, as we continued to use the service we developed a better understanding of its operation and were able to move past these initial troubles.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
For a majority of the team, this was our first time creating a REST API. So making a framework that can be used in the future, for both Git Social and other projects, has been a rewarding experience. Bridging Snapchat's API and React Native was also an incredibly rewarding experience, as it took a fair amount of time and effort to both conceptualize and execute. However, doing so made development of our Android app incredibly easy, so it was time well spent.
What we learned
Each member gained unique knowledge during the course of development, as we worked on new or different aspects of Git Social. However as a team, we learned about working together in order to conceptualize and complete a project on a short deadline, all while maintaining a professional work flow.
What's next for Git-Social
More analytics, visualization, and social. Our goal is to engage people in open source projects; More data and opportunities to share will help us achieve this, pushing users to get engaged in more just the surface level metrics we were able to grab over this 36 hours.
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