Hackathon Project Detector

This browser extension attempts to alert you if the project you are looking at was submitted in a hackathon.

Comment

Inspiration

I always really like stumbling across projects that other people made for hackathons, so I thought maybe other hackers would be just as interested to see what tools they use all the time were once made for a hackathon.

What it does

First a crawler scrapes project info from devpost and enters it into a database, creating one entry for each combination of try me link and hackathon the project was submitted to, then, when you visit a site, the extension checks the URL against the database to see if it is in the database, and was in turn part of a hackathon.

How we built it

The Backend/Scraper was written in PHP, while the frontend, being a chrome extension, had to be JavaScript. The data storage was handled by MySQL, and the actual scraping itself (not the program running it) was handled by cURL.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge faced was just trying to parse all the data being ingested from devpost, because they do not provide an API and because of the complexity of their site, it is taking quite some time to actually extract the relevant information. As of writing this, this isn't finished yet, but itll either be done by the time the hackathon ends or I'll have fallen asleep.

The other challenge was time management, I was volunteering for (what should've been) an hour in the morning and planned to spend the rest of the day on this project, but that work went super late and I didn't end up getting to start on my code until 11:00pm-ish. Because of that I had to scale back the scope of what I wanted to do.

What we learned

Despite having done WebDev for a few years, I've never used any of the service workers, extensions, or progressive web app stuff that chrome has added over the last few years, so it was cool to learn all of that at long last, originally I tried to teach myself this weekend using a recorded workshop from a hackathon from a few months ago, but when that didn't work out, I ended up just teaching myself from online articles.

What's next for Hackathon Project Detector

Fully link the frontend and backend, if I haven't already.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates