Discode

Inspiration

Learning to code is tough. But, it's made better and more fun with your friends.

With the onset of COVID-19, our peers have never felt further apart. We built Discode to gamify the experience of learning to code with those close to you over a famed platform: Discord.

What it does

Discode serves as an end-to-end solution to participate in collaborative Python 3 challenges with friends. It offers the following:

An extensible set of basic programming questions
A robust remote code execution framework
Native support for interactions through Discord's API

How we built it

Discode has two main facets: the Discord bot and the remote code execution engine.

Discord.js is a powerful framework for scripting interactions with Discord servers, and acts as a CLI of sorts. We provide the following:

A well-defined interaction scheme (~help for more information)
Channel cleanup following challenge completion (gotta keep them servers clean!)
An awesome logo

The workhorse of the system is our remote code execution engine for Python3. Here's a brief rundown of what makes Discode work under the hood:

A Redis cache to keep track of the status of code execution jobs (useful for long-running questions that could be implemented later)
A containerized RabbitMQ messaging utility allows for deferred processing of jobs in an ordered manner
An Ubuntu virtual machine hosted in Google Cloud Platform
An Express.js web server that acts as the mesh between Discode and the code execution pipeline

Challenges we ran into

Here's a few:

In hindsight, dealing with "vanilla" Node.js APIs for fetching was cumbersome due to versioning issues
Setting aside a static IP address for the virtual machine
Lots of API keys pushed to public repos (woops)
Certain languages require a lot of work to run code (compiling java and C++, for example), which caused us to limit the project to Python3 for now

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that this thing works at all. It's a bit of a hodge-podge to say the least, but our team learned a TON from doing this.

What we learned

Well, here's a short list:

Managing child processes, and performing adequate cleanup to make sure we don't exhaust resources
Maintaining consistent execution environments with docker-compose (more clutch than Damian Lillard)
Proper splitting of application logic between sync and async components
Testing our code before pushing it (shocking)
We need sleep

What's next for Discode

More languages
A robust schema for giving input (not defaulting to stdin)
Coordinating server-wide challenges that run in parallel
IPO

Built With

Submitted to

DubHacks 2020

Created by

I worked mostly on the front end of the project, creating structure for the bot's various commands and connecting the bot to the back end through various API calls.

Raymond Guo
I worked on the front end, using JavaScript and API interactions to bring the bot functionality, such as responding to certain user commands.

Leon Li
I worked on the front end and helped connect the frontend to the backend. Learned node.js, discord.js, some new javascript, how to use API requests.

Dmitriy Nikitinskyy
I worked on the remote code execution server, along with the API endpoints to serve the discord bot, and learned a large amount about process containerization and capturing outputs

Aroosh Tanay Kumar
I learned a TON about async processing architectures with RabbitMQ. I worked with Aroosh to flesh out the Express server and oversaw the deployment of the backend to GCP.

Vivek Patel