Lighthouse

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Inspiration ✨

I'm a really clumsy person and I keep losing my stuff all the time. Just as I lost my beloved dorm room keys when I was on my way to the IRC one day, I had the most brilliant idea -- lets build an app for that! 💪🏻

What it does 🤔

People post their lost belongings on our platform, where other peers on the network can see them. If someone finds an item belonging to someone, they can win a certain prize money attached to the item, in the form of crypto! The closer the item's last known location is to the prospective "Finder", the closer it'll be to the surface in our UI. If you scroll far enough, you may even find Atlantis! 👀

How we built it ⚙️

A lot of the technology is hosted on the cloud, including the API. We used Terraform to provision all our resources to the cloud. The API is written as a combination of serverless lambda functions and FORTRAN endpoints hosted on a GCP VM and exposed with NGINX (yes, we used FORTRAN! We decided to stick to the theme of Atlantis by writing our API in a truly ancient but powerful language). The frontend is developed in React.JS, and we use GCP's Cloud Storage to store our assets. The MySQL database is stored on the Cloud SQL as well. For the cryptocurrency transactions we use Testnet Bitcoins running on a blockchain parallel to the main Bitcoin blockchain, and use the Bit Python package to communicate with it. To produce SMS and Email alerts we use Twilio and Courier respectively, and we use Auth0 for authentication.

Challenges we ran into 🥶

Frontend development and integration with Auth0
Provision of cloud services with Terraform -- we had no previous experience with Google Cloud!
Exposing the FORTRAN API on the Cloud VM
Coming up with a name!

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😍

Brainstorming the idea
Development of the whole project so far
Breaking our records for most sleepless hours
Grind, teamwork and dedication!

What we learned 💡

The importance of Terraform in simplifying the provision of resources in the cloud
Programmatically performing cryptocurrency transactions
Ideally not to use FORTRAN again!

What's next for Lighthouse ⌛

Complete development and integration of the frontend
Iterative development of the backend, creating it more and more stable and secure
More work on pushing the application to production and marketing

Built With

auth0
courier
crypto
fortran
gcp
nginx
react
serverless
terraform
twilio

Submitted to

jacobsHack! 2021
- Winner Balloon - Rethinking Travel
- Winner MLH - Best Use of Auth0

Created by

I worked on setting up everything on the cloud with Terraform, including the serverless endpoints, cloud storage, cloud database, and VMs. Furthermore, I worked on producing the email and SMS alerts using Twilio and Courier. I also implemented the crypto transactions in the backend on the Testnet Bitcoin blockchain.

Dorrabb Khan
I have implemented the front-end using ReactJS, and the authentication workflows with Auth0.

Hamza Hayak
Worked on the backend using fortran, sqllite, and fastcgi. It was a fun challenge where I tried to use a new language out of my comfort zone! It also fits with the theme of the hackathon as it's an old language!

Bishoy Roufael
I took charge of the designing part of the project by making different Logo types and vectors for the project, I also made the powerpoint presentation, and the promotional video for the project, everything according to this year's edition's theme, The Lost City of Atlantis.

Mohamed Mourad Ouazghire