Helping Hackers!

Connecting people with hackers!

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Inspiration

There are thousands of hackers working on projects every weekend. But we don't always know what problems each community faces. That's why we decided to gather the problems faced by each community so that we hackers could do a better job making the world a better place.

What it does

Helping Hackers! is a webapp that connects people with hackers. Just type out the problems you and your community face and let the hackers handle the rest. Hackers can look through the list of problems faced by the community and build projects that try and solve them. Once a problem has been solved, the solution can be linked along with the problem for anyone facing the same problem later.

Demo

Visit https://hackers-helping-you.online to see a demo!

How we built it

The web site was built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript with Flask as a framework for the site. In the back-end, we used Datastax Astra as our database to store the problem submissions and solves if any. The website was then hosted on the Google cloud platform.

Challenges we ran into

  • Working with DataStax Astra and Apache Cassandra was quite interesting as we only had experience with conventional SQL databases, and this was a NoSQL database. However, we managed to cope with the excellent documentation that was available.
  • We completely missed that this hackathon had slightly different timings, so we started hacking on our hack slightly late haha.
  • We used gunicorn to run the production instance of our webapp when we noticed a weird bug - some submissions were not being recorded in the database! That's when we realized that we had a concurrency problem because we had 4 workers of the app running simultaneously, messing up the data ids.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We're particularly proud of how good the site looks (Of course, if you had a sharp eye, you probably noticed that it was because it's heavily inspired by the amazing Local Hack Day: Build site).
  • We learnt to use CQL and Apache Cassandra with DataStax Astra

What we learned

  • This was our very first time using Apache Cassandra and we learnt quite a bit of CQL in order to interact with the database.
  • We learnt a bit of how to concurrently manage db connections with gunicorn

What's next for Helping Hackers!?

There's a lot coming up for Helping Hackers! We plan to add spam filtering, and email notifications when a problem has been solved by a hacker!

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