Meteors

Inspiration

Ants are tiny little things compared to us Humans they cannot even compete, ant-man was a man who harnessed the power of these small ants as-well as himself to overcome any hurdle and save the day. What we are trying to say is that we aren't super heroes, but we are programmers. The Laptops and PC's we use day to day are nothing compared to monstrous super computers and servers. Occasionally everyone's interests align and together as a team we can solve any analytical problem.

What it does

The network is simple, there is a central hub which acts as the tree, holding everything together. Then each personal computer which connects to the servers, became leaves for a short while where they can donate some of their computing power to solving a larger analytical problem. For this Hackathon we used Meteors and are trying to find where you are most likely to find the most!

How we built it

The platform was built using 1 and 1's server hosting, which offered a great API and allowed us to rapidly scale to meet our needs. The central hub acted as the main storage and distributor of data that was the 1 and 1 server, then we developed three webpages to interact with this server. The first was an upload page, where users can upload a file to be worked on by all and set up restraints on the files as well. The second is the solving page, where users can dedicate a little bit of their time to solving a bigger problem which ties us into our last page. The last page allows users to see the progress that everyone is making on analyzing the data and solving the problem.

Challenges we ran into

Along the way we ran into many hours of headaches all thanks to, very similar languages, from missing semicolons, to $. The biggest issue we ran into was conflicting tutorials on restful api, as this was our first server build, since in the day to day we are the ants of the story, with what we know to be amazing computers but those who work with servers think of as mere Arduinos,

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to use 3 very useful languages with little to no exposure!

What we learned

We have learned a lot in the past 36 hours. Mainly that the probability of a deadly meteor hitting you on the way to a grocery store is very very small. We learned a lot about front end and back end design and that their is no easier one. We spent hours debugging and finalizing to both.

What's next for Meteors

The next step for Meteors is scaling, the platform currently provides enough tools for users too analyze geographic data world wide, for example where the highest concentration of Elvis impersonators are. The true next step will be the scale and how we decide to handle it, we implemented a basic load balancer but it was not something we were able to test very much with a three person team in 36 hours.