sid | Devpost

Inspiration

Jared's grandmother is a high-school librarian, and she deals with issues surrounding student ids everyday. For example, students often forget their physical ids but carry their cell phones at essentially all times. She encourages students to take photos of their ids to display on their phones, but more often than not, the barcodes aren't able to be read by the scanner.

What it does

Our CMS interface is accessible by school administrators who can add student account containing the information necessary to identify them, particularly their student id. Our mobile application calls an API which extracts this information, displaying the student's photo, name, school name, and barcode id. Students can request to change their password, and a form is submitted to their emails for handling.

How we built it

Our mobile application is built natively in Swift 3 and iOS 10.0 using Xcode 8.0. Our CMS interface is built on a stack of Flask, nginx, gunicorn, and html/css. The database driving both clients is MySQL, running on sql.scripts.mit.edu, and our Flask server is hosted on an AWS EC2 instance.

Challenges we ran into

Ensuring that our connections sql.scripts.mit.edu did not overlap. Furthermore, ensuring our database model matched our ORM. Developing in Swift 3, far different from the comfortable Swift 2.*, and building for a target version 10.0, also recently released. Kicking the CentOS box on our EC2 instance required a lot of domain knowledge with respect to the libraries and frameworks we needed to import to run a Flask server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Self-hosting on AWS. Utilizing a free technology at MIT. Building an efficient ORM. Building a CMS as opposed to directly interacting with the database.