My participation in the Hackalong 2018

Over 24 hours on the 11th and 12th of August 2018 my team and I participated in a hackathon, run by the programming community of Twitch. We built an application called DeskShare, and on it you can share pictures of your desktop environment. The team consisted of me and three other friends. Below are their roles in the team and their usernames:

• Haxified (me) — Frontend and API communication

• Daniel — Backend

• RonTheCookie — Backend

• Margobra8 — Frontend

The technology stack we used is that we call the REVN stack this stands for: Rethinkdb, Express, VueJS, and NodeJS. We call it the REVN stack because there is a stack called MEAN, so we just edit it for our stack. We used these technologies because all of our team were very familiar with them, so they seemed like the obvious choice. I worked on the frontend, specifically the communication between the API and the program using Axios, and displaying the data from the api. I also worked on the home page a lot, and the auth and navbar was all done by me (auth was done by me on the frontend, not the backend.)

We built an application called DeskShare, as said above, in it, you can post screenshots of your desktop environment. We decided to go with this idea because every single member of our team primarily uses a distro of Linux, and you can get very creative with desktop environments, so we decided to do it. Another reason is because we were wasting time trying to decide what we should do.

Because this was organised by the Programming community on Twitch, people were encouraged to stream them working on their hackathon project. I started streaming at the start, but I realised that I was getting nervous, having people watching me code, meaning I couldn’t code as well as I could have been, which is vital in a hackathon. Also, streaming was taking up a lot of internet, meaning my music and other things were lagging.

A problem we encountered is that all four of us were in completely different time zones, meaning that making important decisions was normally between 2 or 3 people. This didn’t cause a lot of problems, although it did cause some, one of them being they made a API route that was un-needed meaning they wasted over an hour on something that wasn’t used in the published application.

A mistake we made was that we didn’t make a boilerplate before the project, meaning that we spent around 40 minutes making a base application, meaning we didn’t have as much time as we wanted.

In the end, we won the hackathon, because the most people voted for it. In the end, we got 26 likes, and we don’t know the exact number of votes. We also were the 2nd most voted and liked project!

Overall a very interesting time, an awesome first hackathon experience, and my team and I are very excited to work on some more hackathons!

Screenshots of DeskShare:

The Home Page

The submit setup page

The my setups page

The link to the hackathon: https://hackalong.devpost.com/

The link to our project: https://devpost.com/software/deskshare

The link to a hosted part of our project: https://deskshare.ronthecookie.me

Thanks for reading!