Project Arecibo
Functionality
Project Arecibo is a space themed web-based communications app with educational material related to astronomy, as well as a variety of mini-games. It is named after the Arecibo Observatory, which is famous for its interstellar broadcasts. Many of the features of Project Arecibo were inspired by a site called Space E-Mail. It was created over the course of 2 different 6-week sprint for TechWise's cohort II group project. The website features secure user accounts, a public message board, an interactive front-end, about-us pages for each of the project authors, and several easter eggs.
Tech-Stack
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were naturally used for web development. Vite, Node.js, Express.js, and React.js were used as extensions for running the web-server and for making a more dynamic front-end. We used MongoDB as a database for storing user account data and for the public message board. BCrypt was used to encrypt user data and keep it secure. We initially used AWS for creating a VM instance to run our server, but eventually migrated it to a Google Cloud server instead. Our team used GitHub as our version control.
Our Group
The project was created by team Pixel Plunderers, which consisted of Jaya Sicard as our creative lead and head presenter, Eric Holman as our lead front-end designer and games designer, Amber Miller as the designer of our mascot Omar, and Marlo Ongkingco as our cryptographer.
My Role
I functioned as the primarily as the server administrator throughout the project. I set up the first AWS VM instance for the first project sprint, and I migrated the server to Google Cloud for the second sprint. I also worked on the back-end, setting up the MongoDB database and creating the public messaging system. In general I also managed everyone's code to keep it organized and compatible. I managed our GitHub repository, and during the second sprint I re-organized the code from our first sprint into more modular chunks.