GlacierLMS

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Inspiration

For a while now, Reman Hogbisz LLC has provided software development services to local schools in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Typically they come to us with a problem and we try and figure out a solution.

Here's the problem. Every time we write a new project for them, we reinvent the wheel. We have to recreate the student management portion of the project which we've already implemented for the dozen other projects.

Introduce GlacierLMS, a school information management software and orchestration platform. It will allow for the centralization of this information that we share across apps and increase performance, reduce development time, and overall make our platforms better.

What it does

Simply put, this service will hold all the crucial information each of our apps needs and (through a secured, modular-style API) allow for the management of said information through not only our platform GlacierPortal, but also on any services schools may choose to adopt or develop using our platform.

How we built it

The system leverages a Rust, PostgreSQL, and React stack to allow for seamless integration with our existing platforms. The implementation itself was pretty simple as the software is mostly just an ORM on the backend.

The design of the frontend in React is all thanks to our 4th member Sam Dovel and existing Hogbisz member Gabriel Hogan who tag teamed together throughout the whole project to get everything gorgeous for you all.
The seamless linking of the backend to the frontend through TS in React was done by Derrick Nguyen
Finally, the design of the backend in Rust was done by existing Hogbisz member Samuel Rembisz

Further, for those folks out there who like AWS:

We use RDS (written for PostgreSQL) for most of our production platforms and plan on using it for the student database
Our backend is running on EKS and we leverage Kubernetes with ELB to spin up as many instances as needed
We've been using EC2 throughout the event for our dev and staging environments, specifically a c6i.4xl for each of us
We use S3 buckets historically for student/staff profile pictures and will be using it for this app as well
We use SES/SNS for notifications to our users
Finally, we use CloudFront to maximize our page loading times and we could potentially distribute our services throughout the US

Challenges we ran into

We definitely had some problems with the time crunch. 3 days is not enough time to nitpick, so when we butted heads over differing opinions on the way a logo should be sized, the names of function calls, and more, we needed to get it figured out quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud to finally begin development on this, this is an accomplishment in itself for full time college students with part time jobs 😅. In terms of just the project itself, we're very happy with how seamlessly we integrated with the other team members. Reman Hogbisz has historically been a 2 man team, but we got together with students from other colleges to bring together this project and we're hopeful that going forward the relationships we built during this competition will last.