Social Duel

Inspiration

We wanted to build a platform that brings the community together in fun and meaningful ways. We did this by creating a challenge platform that encourages users to participate in local challenges.

What it does

Our application is a social platform where you have a set time to complete a task, like taking a photo and sharing it with a specific hashtag, or answer an obscure trivia question based on your cities local history. If you succeed, you stay in the competition. If not, you're eliminated for the duration of the challenge. Every period we reach one winner in each city. Games can last days or months depending on how long it takes to reach a winner.

How we built it

We used the popular MERN stack, which includes MongoDB Atlas, Express.js, React, and Node.js. On top of these technologies, we also used Auth0 for user authentication and secure login, and Google Cloud for persistent serverless hosting for our backend. All of our user and challenge data is stored in MongoDb, and we communicate with this database by using Express middleware built on top of Node.

There were also many accessory technologies we used that helped us develop our product. Libraries like tailwindCSS, electron-vite, and dotenv saved us time without adding any significant overhead or complexity!

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was piecing together all the moving parts. Learning the MERN stack was challenging, and we learned that often times libraries become dependent on other libraries, therefore version changes and deprecated folders can sometimes make or break your application! Aside from the MERN stack, we also had some initial struggles getting Google Cloud to run an instance of our Node.js server, as we used electron-vite to package and build our application, a technology which (although similar to Vite) doesn't have nearly as much documentation and support due to its age.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest challenge became our biggest accomplishment as we learned how all these moving parts for a full-stack web AND desktop/mobile application got pieced together. Initially, we all started off working on separate tasks, and

What we learned

We learned how to combine the front end and back end of a web application.

What's next for Social Duel

Funding???

Built With

• auth0
• electron
• electron-vite
• express.js
• github
• google-cloud
• mongodb
• node.js
• raspberry-pi
• react
• react-router
• tailwindcss
• vite