Dev Helpr

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Our home page with a few posts on it.
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Our Inspiration:

Trying to find people to work with you on projects can be hard! Finding people to join your hackathon team can also be hard. That's why we created Dev Helpr!

What does it do?

Dev Helpr is a web app that allows developers to make posts about anything from the problems they may face in their own projects to a request for help on a side project. Dev Helpr allows users to make posts looking for help or to help and also allows other users to comment on posts. We also added GitHub integration so we can display contribute statistics.

How we built it:

We decided to use React and js to build the front end of our website as we wanted to try to choose a framework that wasn't too hard to pick up and we used Go and MariaDB to create our backend since none of us had ever used go and we thought it would be a good opportunity to start to learn. Each one of us had different responsibilities for the project:

==> Russell worked on creating critical react components, added routing, and worked on several of the CSS files. ==> Sean worked on creating the Maria DB Database, GO API, Linux server, and services. Did the majority of the work on our backend. Sean also spent some time trying to implement SSO with Github for expanded integrations and more seamless working on projects. ==> Jimmy worked on developing the login and home page UI, created several of the components, and also helped out with parts of the backends. As the project grew, we added several features and refactored a few times until we got to a decent spot with our codebase. We deployed our app using nodejs and served it to a webserver to host it.

Challenges we ran into:

Learning a framework and language is no small task. Jimmy and Russell had to learn React to do the front end of the project and Sean took it upon himself to learn and use go for the backend of the project. Besides the learning curve of getting the hang of the frameworks and languages, an issue we ran into was fitting all the pieces together at the end (or as we like to call it the crunch stage of development). The backend of the project was no small undertaking and wasn't ready until just before the crunch. There were features we wanted to have but weren't able to add just due to time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We all are proud of walking away from this hackathon with a new set of tools and knowledge under our belts. This is all our first hackathons so we are proud of being able to make a working version of anything. Another thing we are all proud of is the collaborative effort we all put into this project. Each one had a different role in the project and missing any one of us would have prevented us from being able to finish.

What We learned:

On top of the new languages we all learned this weekend, we all learned how to roadmap a project and meet deadlines. There were a few times during the day where we all had to talk about what we actually need compared to what we might want the project to do. Multiple times we had to scale back and readjust what our goal was and how we were going to get there. We also learned the things JS is and isn't capable of with frameworks and React JS.

Project Management:

By organizing our planned features with the scrum method we were able to delegate and execute tasks faster than if we all just worked on our own thing. Our team's utilization of git to manage our project saved us a ton of time and headaches. The simplicity of tracking features through branches and having the ability to merge differences was a crucial part of getting any collaborative work done on this project. If we didn't know git, it would have likely been a lot harder to manage all the different versions of files.

What's next for Dev Helpr:

Hopefully, when we're all rested and get the chance, we would like to add more GitHub integration (show data about users, repos. etc.), add auto-moderation, analytics pages, and more. Our goal is to add features as we can but feel free to submit a pull request on GitHub, we would love all the help we can get!