koala-borate.online

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  Landing Page laods without any link

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  Multiple users collaborate together on any webpage

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  Different Access Levels for easy moderation

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  No Hinderance, clean and responsive UI

• 

  Original MASCOT

Inspiration

Ever since the world has called into the fangs of COVID-19, all segments of life have taken a major hit. One of these is the education sector and the pedagogy that was initially followed. I also faced a similar problem in college, as group projects were no more group anymore :(.

It has become really difficult to collaborate with team members, classmates, research in groups, and brainstorm together. As of now, the solutions that exist are either using an online document or a group chat. Both of these have a fundamental problem: quick access.

Even wondered why there a comment feature in Figma or Google Docs? Exactly the same reason. It does not matter how great the product is, but if it does not allow 2-way-communication, users will wear away.

But what about the Internet!

What it does

• Turns the internet to your notebook. A communication channel across the internet.
• It is a browser extension that runs on the chromium family of browsers. (chrome, edge ...)

• Allows user to manage their accounts (sign-up, sign-in, logout etc)

• allows users to navigate the internet in free flow, and cause 0 hindrances in their normal flow.

• Automatic tab capture. Users do not need to even click the extension to log in or manage their accounts. It is done by itself, whenever they open a new tab.

• Launches instantly on any website. Just Click on the extension icon.

• Hierarchy in User Access. Backend arranges the stake-holders in a hierarchy, so that it is easy to simulate user behavior and grant roles and responsibilities.

• Intelligently handles URL. This allows the extension to find similarity between http://https://www.hoohacks.io/ and https://www.hoohacks.io/#readme, or with https://www.hoohacks.io/user?id=10 and treat all three as the same page.

• Focus on currently reading note, to avoid bulky UI

How we built it

I built two components.

A backend (https://github.com/YashKumarVerma/coalaborate-backend) following a systematic project structure, and using CQL for database operations.

The backend is written in typescirpt to ensure that there is a predictable behavior when dealing with data.

And a Chrome extension that utilizes React and Chromoum API features to monitor tabs, new tab actions, user interactions and authentication flows.

Challenges we ran into

• Used cassandra for the first time. This caused major issues as I was completely new to the syntax and feature. This caused an initial delay in the backend development.
• No Local Database Access: since I was learning to use astra.datastax.com for the database hosting as part of the hack, all operations were always online and the database had to be built around it.
• Chrome Extension: this was my first chrome extension to be written using React, and I faced a lot of issues in getting it run.
  

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Built a thin level of abstraction that allowed me to isolate the database layer from the application and then debug it and test it separately.
• This allowed me to build using an intermediate database instance, and then use the cassandra instance when we were in the part of integrating everything.
• I build the chrome extension using React, which can handle new tabs, this was a really nice acheievemnt as I had never done this before.
• There were some path issues, but fixed those by bring multiple classes into one.

What we learned

• Cassandra
• React and API management
• Chrome Extensions
• designing a mascot!

What's next for koala-borate.online

• admin dashboard
• option to join teams
• synd data real time.

Original Artwork by Yash Kumar Verma

Built With

• extension
• node.js
• react
• typescript