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Drawing a biene on Skrunkle Draw.
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Lookind through Skrunkle Draw's feed.
Inspiration
When looking at the sponsors for HackUPC 2026 we noticed that many were using AI generated images. This inspired us to create a platform by and for artists focused on sharing the joy of art with others. A key feature is guaranteeing that what you're looking at is a human creation. We put especially great focus on the silliness, whimsy and humanity that is usually missing from so called "AI Art". We designed Skrunkly Draw to focus especially on these aspects of drawing while also ensuring human made art through our integrated drawing app.
What it does
Skrunkly Draw is a social media platform with an integrated drawing app that allows users to draw images and share them as posts or replies. On the drawing side it creates unique challenges and opportunities through its simplified tools and effects. The tools provided are designed to free users of all skill levels from the burden of perfectionism and encourage creative expression and sharing whimsical art.
How we built it
We split the team in two: Frontend and backend. One half focused on building a REST API backed by MongoDB Atlas while the other half made the the boring JSON objects come to life with a web UI.
Challenges we ran into
As the prophecy says, we turned it on and it scaled right up... ...Until it didn't. Suddenly, our MongoDB Atlas instance started replying to all of our requests with "Sorry, all shards are busy!" (Shards being the secret ingredient in the webscale sauce). We scrambled to upgrade to the paid plan, to get a more powerful instance, to no avail. It wasn't until we took a break for dinner that we got some clues. MongoDB was replying to some of us just fine and not to others. Finally, we ended up figuring out that "Server selection timeout: No available servers." can mean that no servers want to handle your request because your IP is not on the whitelist. Since then, we've been on the watch-out adding whichever new IPs the FIB's routing throws at us.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As it was our first time working with a no SQL database, we weren't sure how smooth it would go. Apart from a few notable hiccups it went fairly smooth. Thorough studying of the relevant documentation and our preexisting experience with the languages we picked made this project possible.
What we learned
We learnt an interesting, new paradigm for storing data. MongoDB's Collection and Page model has been exciting to work with.
What's next for Skrunkly draw
We'll continue to refine Skrunkly Draw, enriching the experience by adding more features and polishing the platform with the feedback from artists.
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