Inspiration
Our inspiration for this app was based on web games that implemented a simple, user friendly interface, and provided a fun, new kind of game to play.
What it does
What the Trend is a web game where players compete against each other to submit the most trending word, according to the Google Trends API. Player each log into a game on their own device, and are given a word (they all get the same word) to start the first round. They must each append a word before the starter word before the timer runs out, and the submission that scores as the highest trending wins the round.
How we built it
What the Trend is built using a node.js backend running on a virtual server in the cloud, and a frontend running reactjs. Almost the entire project was built in javascript.
Challenges we ran into
It was hard, I promise In order to chain calls to the Google Trends API for better popularity/time resolution (which is an asynchronous call), we have to use JS promises within promises. This proved to be quite a challenge due to the conceptual differences between Javascript and most other programming languages.
return new Promise(function(resolve, reject)
{
trendingAPI.getPopularity(w).then(function(result)
{
console.log("api result for " + result + w);
resolve(result);
}).catch(function(err){
console.log(err);
})
});
DDOSing Google Excessive use of the Google Trends API from one server side IP address looked suspicious to the tech giant, and ended up in our server's IP getting "banned" in the last hour of the competition. In order to avoid this in the future, we should have made the API calls from the client.
The Outcome
Even though we each came into this project with different types and levels of experience, we all learned a ton about newer web frameworks, and had a lot of fun over the 24+ hours we worked together. Although the final product from the hackathon requires some work, we plan to continue this in the future.
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