A Fullstack Hakathon

Patrick Hoyt
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

One of the most interesting and fun parts of the Fullstack curriculum has been the hackathon… otherwise known as the “Stackathon”. Over the course of 4 days (including the weekend) each student develops an application of their choosing. I decided to create a “Photographer” application.

Photographer is a simple image sharing application where users can upload photos to their account. Users can also view the images of other accounts.

The idea for this app came from the fact that no one in our cohort signed up for the role of class photographer. So I decided to create a platform where everyone can share the load of this demanding role :)

Photographer is a web application built with Node.js and React.js. However, I wanted the app to work on mobile devices as well. I was able to make this a responsive web app using material design components. The app is fully functional on mobile browsers!

Initially I thought that the responsive design would not be an issue. It turns out that responsive components in React are hard to create! It essentially comes down to how react renders and re-renders components. React’s life cycle methods are in charge of this rendering and it turns out that screen size is not one of their priorities. Luckily there are several NPM libraries available that solve this problem. These include material-ui and react-mdl.

For image storage I chose to use AWS S3. Cofiguring S3 for my image storage was another fun learning experience. I enjoyed researching authorization concepts like signed requests and CORS rules.

There are definitely a lot of features that could be added to this app. I plan on working on these features after graduation when I finally have some free time :) Feature such as comments, likes, and photo-editing are at the top of the list.

Overall this Stackathon was a really great experience in which I put together all of the skills and concepts that I have been learning over the past 2 months.

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