2023 Bell GeekFest

Fall of 2023, me and my friend from Marie-Victorin attended the Bell GeekFest 2023 conference in Montreal. This was our first time attending a hackathon.

The hackathon was one day long and was held at the Westin Hotel in Montreal. The theme of the hackathon was Security and me and my friend Harjot decided to make a fully secure messaging app.

We were conflicted on which framework to use, but we ended up using React for the front-end and Django for the back-end. At this point in time I had very little experience with any full stack development at all and I learned a lot in this one night. I had gotten back home and, while Harjot was working on Django, I was trying to make the same features in Spring Boot. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to finish the back-end in Spring Boot, so we ended up using Harjot's app. Django is higher level than Spring Boot, so it was easier to get the app up and running in a short amount of time. The features stayed the same :

• User registration and login
• Secure messaging between users
• End-to-end encryption of messages
• Salting and hashing of passwords

Our app was simple but effective. The messaging ran seemlessly and the encryption worked well. We were able to demonstrate the app to the judges and they were impressed with our work, nonetheless, we didn't manage to reach top 3 with the large amount of participants. Still, I attribute this hackathon to my interest in full stack development and I learned a lot about security, encryption and how to build a full stack app in a short amount of time.

Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of the event, due to the fact that I was so focused on the app that I forgot to take any. I do still have the bell themed name tag they gave us, which I still have to this day hung up on my wall.