RUplace

Inspiration

RUplace was inspired by Wplace, which is a live, collaborative, and interactive canvas. We decided to build on this idea, as explained below.

What it does

RUplace allows any user to color a grid square on the Rutgers map in a color from our color picker. What this means is that teams of users can collaborate to create art at different locations in an ongoing community-wide event.

How we built it

We built our user interface using React, and our backend in Go. We used GORM for easier database interaction (which was in SQLite), and maplibregl to help render an interactive map.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was rendering colors on the grid using React. We also spent a bit of time with the client-server communication using WebSocket and RPC.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

At the very least, we're proud of our color grid overlay on the Rutgers map, but we're also proud of our scalable design. The backend was designed to scale to the thousands of potential users that Rutgers has. Lastly, we're proud of our collaborative skills. We were impressed by how well we were able to parallelize our work for efficiency, which would not have been possible without good communication.

What we learned

We learned that it's very much worth spending a lot of time at the beginning designing and exchanging ideas before jumping into the coding. In previous hackathons, we fell into the trap of instantly writing code, but this time, we would like to partly attribute our success to our new way of working.