Breaking out a leprechaun: Highlights from Demo Day #1
We had our first Demo Day at MetaKGP last week (17th January, 2018) and boy was it fun!
Demo Days are our attempt at creating a tradition of celebrating high-impact projects within KGP. In the little time between our announcement and the first Demo Day, we had 2 submissions from the extreme ends of KGP’s population: A fresher alongside a 5th year student! Read along for an overview of the projects demoed.
Vikrant Varma, co-founder of MetaKGP, accompanied us as the arbiter for the demo. You can find the archived live stream for the event on our channel.
Demos
Our first demo was from Siddharth Kannan, a 5th year Mechanical engineering undergrad who demoed Leprechaun. (Well, this leprechaun had one less coat & a hat and a lot less beard!)
As Siddharth puts it, Leprechaun was envisioned as an authentication service which will associate an email address to an IIT Kharagpur roll number, using proof-of-control over the respective accounts.
In Layman’s terms, Leprechaun connects a given roll number and email address if you could prove you have control over each of them. It starts with ERP, where if you could change any one security question for the roll number to include a unique text sequence generated by Leprechaun, it stands as proof that you own the ERP account (and in effect, the roll number).
Once changed, Leprachaun goes and verifies if any of your security questions (which can be triggered with just the roll number… *slow claps* ERP) contain the unique sequence. If successful, Leprechaun then sends another unique link to your email which completes the flow when you click on it. Bingo! The email address can now associated with the roll number.
Leprechaun ensures that students don’t have to share their ERP credentials with any application where they would like to authenticate themselves as students of IIT Kharagpur.
You can try out Leprechaun live at https://leprechaun.metakgp.org/
All of Leprechaun is written in Golang and can be viewed here at https://github.com/icyflame/leprechaun.
Contributions to Leprechaun are always welcome. MetaKGP will soon be integrating this project with some of it’s services.
Our second demo of the day came from Shivam Kumar Jha, a CSE fresher who had been working on a game, Brkout, with the help of his fellow batchmate Kousshik Raj during their winter break. Brkout was inspired by Atari’s 1976 sensation, Breakout built by Steve Wozniak (aka. “The Woz”)! Brkout re-imagines the original game as a jail break scenario and promises hours of fun (How about the days in class reminiscing about the Nintendo NES and 8-bit GameBoy?)
The goal in the game is to break the yellow ball out of the randomly generated grid of bricks using the green puck as fast as possible. With multiple difficulty levels, freaky sounds and menus full of sinister messages, Brkout is very well the best indie game to come from the youngest of the KGP community.
Brkout is completely written with Python using the Pygame module. It is still in active development and inviting contributors at https://github.com/TheLethalCode/brkout/. The README also has complete installation instructions for those interested in trying out the game!
A lot of such ideas and projects are always being worked on at KGP, but hidden away within hostel rooms and inquisitive minds. Come, join us in this tradition of creating high impact projects for the joy of giving back to the community and the rush of demoing them in front of an audience. (Oh, and the chance of winning some cash while doing it!)
For more details about Demo Days, have a look at our announcement post.
If you have a project you’d like to demo, you can sign up here for our next Demo Day on 1st of February, 2018. Subscribe to our Facebook page or join our mailing list for more updates.
Sign up link: https://goo.gl/forms/d6rhzbjfayDLyqYW2
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/metakgp/
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/metakgp.official
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/metakgp-announce
Demo days will also be streamed live on your YouTube Channel. Subscribe to the channel for updates.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUgekHbc-ntGOh4AwzOPoNQ
Still curious?
Come hang out with us on Slack (https://slack-invite.metakgp.org/) or our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/metakgp.official/) and let us know what you think.
See you at the next demo!
