Chime

"Track Exams, Ace Notes, Spread Holiday Cheer."

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Inspiration

Since a long time I had been putting off learning backend and finally move beyond HTML,CSS,JS and React. When I came upon this hackathon opportunity, I decided to implement that finally and combine that with the merry outlook of these holidays into something that turns into a product of value.

What it does

  1. Secure user authentication for safe access
  2. AI-powered summarization of uploaded study notes( using Gemini API free tier)
  3. Text-to-speech support to listen to summarized content( Web Speech API)
  4. Interactive Christmas tree decoration using drag-and-drop
  5. Download and share decorated trees with friends
  6. (Exam) calendar to track upcoming exams and important dates
  7. Helps students stay organized, productive, and engaged

How I built it

Since I worked solo, it was first necessary to divide the task flow properly. I spent the majority of first week of getting started in understanding backend and implementing signup ,login and cookie based session authentication from scratch. I added email verification upon signup as an enhancement. After that I spent some days in getting the then-backbone UI to what I want and then worked upon different routes('/notes','/calendar' etc).

Challenges I ran into

I struggled with implementing signup and login routes initially but clarified it by browsing online. Apart from the general errors one faces, I had the most difficulty in deploying my application. I have the frontend on Vercel, backend on Render and DB on Supabase and things were silently failing because Supabase connection string used IPv6 and the other two were compatible with IPv4 only. Since it was my first time deploying a non static website, it was tough to finally have it up and running.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud of having pushed my limits to finally create a full-stack(PERN) application. I explored new, different npm libraries and understood what happens beneath the hood in user authorization and authentication. Moreover it was a good brain exercise to debug my deployment errors and finally get the website up and working beyond 'localhost'.

What I learned

I learnt to be more patient and slow while learning something new. It's important to take one's time , ask queries on the internet/ chatgpt and understand all code, no matter if I had to prompt chatgpt to give me a headsup code or wrote something fully on my own. Because the moment I stopped doing that, my application broke with tons of errors. Of course there is the valuable technical knowledge I gained on the way.

What's next for Chime

  1. Google & GitHub OAuth, forgot and reset password options
  2. Adding avatar to user profile using Multer and Cloudinary(currently DiceBear is being used to generate a unique profile picture based on an email seed)
  3. Notifications could be added to user profile-as a bubble with number of events for the day which then disappears once user has opened the profile.

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