Heroes of Tech

Inspiration

We all know that waste within the tech industry is a big problem. Not only is it a waste of money, but many components can be harmful to our environment when disposed of incorrectly. We wanted to find a way to not only facilitate the sharing of tech but also to encourage it with a level-up system.

What it does

A Gumtree-like service to list tech you have to give, or tech you wish to get. By giving and taking more tech, both the Superhero (User) and the Sidekick (Tech) level-up. Leaderboards encourage users to partake in exchanges to raise their standing. If you give/take a higher level Sidekick, your Superhero level increase by a larger amount.

Challenges we ran into

We had some IRL problems which meant we only got to start working properly on Sunday, giving us a very small amount of time to work on our very ambitious project.

We chose to use technologies that neither of us has used before. Amy was working on the front end using React for the first time and Adam was working on the backend creating his own database and API from scratch. Because of this, we spent a lot of time having to learn the technologies before actually getting any functioning code working.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we each created something within the time we were left with, and we are confident that if we were to attempt a similar project again we are now equipped to get coding far quicker.

What we learned

Basically everything for React, Node and API building from scratch.

What's next for Heroes of Tech

We want to actually build the rest of it! Specifically, create the rest of the UI and get requests to the database actually returning some useful JSON.

We originally wanted to use Blockchain instead of a SQL database, but when we sat down to plan the project we realised that that would be too ambitious for the weekend given that neither of us has created a Blockchain before. Moving forward we would like to migrate over to using Blockchain to record everything.