UArchive

Inspiration

We were inspired by sites like RateMyProf and Leetcode when designing the UI of the site, and drew on personal experiences when coming up with the idea itself.

What it does

UArchive allows students to post content summaries of courses they have taken, as well as post practice problems and warnings of potential unexpected pitfalls for the courses they have taken. By doing this, it takes information that was previously only passed by word-of-mouth and makes it accessible to all, preserving it for years to come.

How we built it

To develop this system we used Vite (React) for the front end, and a MongoDB database controlled by a FastAPI backend.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge in this project was connecting the backend to the frontend and ensuring elements updated in the databhase. Thankfully, we had a skilled database developer on our team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of having designed a UI that is consisted with UCalgary's branding, and for striving to their respect their policies when designing the site's feature set (e.g. excluding images of exams). The database integration in particular is something we're proud of, since it consistently tracks upvotes, problems, and summaries, and it was the first time using FastAPI and MongoDB for most of our team.

What we learned

We learned a lot about time management, Vite, MongoDB and FastAPI. Also, about using git branches to delegate tasks across team members and on setting up database servers using a Raspberry Pi. On the soft skills side, we learned how to manage time and work under pressure, and will carry a number of lessons forward into future hackathons, like planning out technologies we're going to use beforehand to ensure everyone can contribute to the best of their ability.