Hacker's Hall of Fame

A better way to keep track of a hacker's journey. The app's usable by hackathon organizers to give hackers their badges digitally, and for hackers to keep track of these badges in a one-stop-gallery.

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💡 Inspiration💡

As a hacker, one thing I wished I had was the ability to view all the stickers and prizes I got in a digital environment . Devpost makes it difficult. I intended to make a better solution. What I intended to do was to make a system to securely store hackathon stickers or badges or collectible certificates as an easy-one-stop-shop for recruiters to view and for me to more efficaciously track my hackathon journey.

⚙️ What it does ⚙️

Organizers: after being verified as a hackathon organizer, the organizer can send badges to participants by sending images and specifying the prize category. They can allow the app to automatically find users to give it to (which is immediately accessible to them) or choose usernames manually.

Participants: can view their hackathon journey, look at other people’s journeys, and print their badges like certificates.

Website: The website serves as a quick-look option at the badges, intended for participants to add as URLs in their LinkedIn profiles or resumes to showcase their hall of fame.

🏗️ How I built it 🏗️

the app was brought together with Flask; the Whatsapp and iOS counterparts both use Flask to interact with the relational CockroachDB database ("users", "badge information", and each "badge" given to each "user").

🟣 Twilio 🟣

I used ngrok to connect Twilio to the flask app. I used a flask POST request that the Twilio WhatsApp bot calls whenever the user sends a text and is processed by flask. I used Twilio’s Messaging Responses to send custom messages depending on what the user is currently doing. The images sent to the WhatsApp bot are stored on Twilio, and I use them in the CockroachDB database.

🔴 DeSo 🔴

I added some DeSo code to create the images as NFTs on the DeSo blockchain, for more secure storage of the images. It’s also much more swag.

⚫ GitHub Usage ⚫

The app consists of iOS, WhatsApp, and database components. I used three different branches for each component, and it helped me to organize one repository in two different IDEs and programming languages, XCode (Swift, SwiftUI) and Visual Studio Code (Python, Flask). As the current app is not accessible in the app store, hackers can get run the current version of the app by installing it on GitHub. A redirected link to do that is possible from the webpage.

🚩 Challenges I ran into

DeSo challenges: I don’t have any DeSo coiin left, so I wasn’t able to test the DeSo endpoints. For that reason, I also withdrew from using DeSo verification and making the images NFTs for now. Instead, for the demo, I was forced to simply keep the badges as images, which are not quite as secure. I do, however, have the DeSo code written on a separate GitHub branch.

🥇 Accomplishments that I’m proud of

This was my first solo hackathon project and I’m so thrilled to make a functional product. I also think that the idea to view badges quickly and easily is a feature that all hackers should be able to access and that may actually happen in due time. I’m proud of making a product that may inspire future potential updates for the hacker community to track their hackathon journey.

📚 What I learned

It was my first time integrating two different programming languages together (not counting database languages). I didn’t know that I could connect python and swift through the use of APIs, but it turned out to be super smooth with the help of JSON standardized data. I have also never used DeSo, and it was interesting to implement their API. I had to do multithreading and asynchronous loading in swift to wait for data from python endpoints; incredible stuff I never learned.

⏳ What's next for Hackers’ Hall of Fame?

Projects: I forgot about adding integration with the actual hackathon project that made you win.

Devpost Verification: To verify that an organizer is really an organizer for the hackathon, the app might need some integration with Devpost.

Website: It should be even better if organizers can simply create NFTs and gift them out right from a website or the app instead of WhatsApp. I chose WhatsApp because I felt it was a creative new way of automating information, but using this in the website is good too.

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