BitFix

Inspiration

While I was scrolling through the Slack channel for this hackathon, I witnessed the sheer amount of software developers who desperately wanted to contribute to these projects getting drowned out by even more software developers looking to donate their time. At the same time, there were countless project proposals and people looking for others to contribute to their projects.

In this atmosphere, I don't think anyone has the time or willpower to commit to one project for too long. We need talented developers to donate their time and energy to effectively address small issues across various systems that they're knowledgeable about. That's where BitFix comes in.

What it does

BitFix is a simple email-based application that connects open source social good projects on GitHub with software developers that want to donate their time and energy to software for social good. Each morning, BitFix emails developers up to 3 Issues from GitHub projects signed up with BitFix that match the developer's area of software expertise as well as their interests. Projects get the benefit of increased developers helping out, and developers get the ease of finding new interesting open source projects.

How we built it

We collected data from fellow developers and open-source project owners through a Google Form, and accessed it from a Google Spreadsheet. We continued by parsing the data that we downloaded into a .csv file, and stored it into a SQLITE database. After that part was done, we accessed each project's repository and collected data about each of its issues using HTTP requests through the GitHub API. We then wrote a script that matches each developer with up to three issues from projects that align with their interests and skillset. Then we leveraged the Gmail API to send out emails to each user containing the links to projects they've been matched with.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into four major challenges while engineering BitFix. For one, we had to ensure that the provided links to GitHub repositories were actually valid. Another issue we encountered was parsing through the JSON String that contained a list of dictionaries, where each dictionary held the information about each individual issue in the repo. Lastly, the biggest we had was sending the information we collected and matched to the user preferences to the users themselves. The GMail API provided many challenges due to its authentication requirements, and syncing with its API using the access key.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of getting almost everything up and running so quickly as well as having email semi-functional. This is our first time building an email app, which some believe are coming back into vogue.

What we learned

We learned how to parse JSON files effectively, create a project that uses Google Credentials to run, and dealing with an API that has authentication keys and authorization issues.

What's next for BitFix

We'd like to scale BitFix up significantly and make it into a real developer service. I'd love to contribute to open source but its always hard finding projects that are both interesting and match my skillset. We'd first have to sync up the google spreadsheet up with our database, then get the emails formatted with HTML to look cleaner, and then start publicizing the service more effectively.