DuckOverflow

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project is a very popular website called "StackOverflow." We wanted to create a web app powered by AI that solely focuses on programming related questions. For this event, we figured we would make it duck themed!

What it does

It takes a code related question from a user and uses the Gemini API to generate an answer to the question. The website is formatted like a blog, so you can view posts made by different users.

How we built it

Our main tech stack consists of Django for the backend and React + Vite for the front end. The first hour was all about setup, we initialized the Django framework and React + Vite. Vite came in super handy because of the "Hot Module Refresh" feature, making front end development super efficient. For the front end, it mainly involved making unique pages that would be eye-catching. The backend involved making our own API and databases to be utilized within the site. To ensure the best quality of everything, the team spend nearly all 24 hours awake, hacking away.

Challenges we ran into

The beginning was smooth, but after we got done with the initial setup, things were rough. Everyone experienced issues with dependencies missing, version control issues, code disappearing--it was a nightmare. The collaboration part was the most difficult aspect of it all, figuring out who was working on what and what you could do next. A lot of the features got stripped out of the end product because we spent so much time debugging near the end of development,

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming into the hackathon, nobody in our team had any prior knowledge of Large Language Models, and we definitely didn't have a clue how to implement one into our website. Some of us had some beginner knowledge on html and css, but nobody knew how we were going to connect the backend and frontend. Through lots of trial and error, we were eventually able to get gemini running and working how we wanted it to! Being able to properly implement some kind of working cite utilizing all of the skills we did know (and even the ones we learned during the time of the hack-a-thon), we are overall pleased and happy with how the features and display came together.

What we learned

Communication is definitely something important while working on a project. The version control taught us that. We also learned the value of patience, determination and persistence, especially when it came to debugging and the various issues that we run into. We also learned a lot about the innerworkings of what goes into making a frontend web page: how to utilize and display colors, images, the various sign up/sign in boxes, the actual ai display. Overall, the hack-a-thon has been a great experience in teaching us the values of what it means to work in a team and how we can each play to our strengths while growing together in our weaknesses.

What's next for DuckOverflow

With the free tech domain we have acquired, our team is hoping to keep developing DuckOverflow into something much bigger! Hopefully we will migrate our database to something more scalable, improve the UI/UX, and make the code a lot more efficient!