MongoDB Atlas Hackathon Help Thread

If you're participating in the MongoDB Atlas Hackathon and you need some help with your submission, welcome! You are in the right place and we're excited to help.

If you have any questions about how this contest works (ex: due dates, how to post your submission, picking a category, etc.) the DEV team will be happy to assist you.

If you are running into issues or get stuck when it comes to using MongoDB, we will surface all technical questions for the MongoDB team and answer here on their behalf!

Please comment below if you need asynchronous assistance with the MongoDB Atlas Hackathon ❤️

P.S. If you'd like to share an update on the progress you're making on your project or if you'd like to connect with other participants, please do so in the community update thread!

Comments

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

Hi @mongodb_staff and @thepracticaldev , when will the hackathon be over i.e. the last time to complete the hackathon. Is it 13 Jan 2022 11:59 pm PT or 13 Jan 2022 11:59 pm UTC?

In the announcement article, both times can be seen written.
The PT time is mentioned in "Additional rules"
The UTC time is mentioned in "Important dates".

Please clarify as I don't want to miss out on the opportunity and miss submitting my project.

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

So sorry for any confusion. The deadline was 13 Jan, 2022 at 11:59 UTC — however we misrepresented this initially so we will be counting all submissions that we receive through 7:59 AM UTC on January 14

[Anika Tibrewala]

Hi, kindly consider our project, we submitted project following the deadline "Submissions are due on January 13th, 2022 @ 11:59 PM PT/2 AM ET on January 14th, 2022/6 AM UTC on January 14th, 2022" as shared previously. We've put in a lot of effort in our project, requesting you to kindly consider the submission for the hackathon.

[Valentine Sean Chanengeta]

Same this side, I was relying on the submission template deadline

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

Hi everyone! So sorry for this confusion and for the errors in the announcement post. There were mistakes with the deadline as it was originally written and I sincerely apologize.

We will consider all entries submitted up until January 13th, 2022 @ 11:59 PM PT/2:59 AM ET on January 14/7:59 AM UTC on January 14, 2022. Not to worry! @valentinesean22, @hinasoftwareengineer, @geekysrm

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

Thank you so much for clarifying that! :)

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

Of course. I hate to think that this mistake on my end caused you all stress. Thank you for participating! We will make sure that this mistake doesn't happen again in future hackathons.

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

Thanks for organizing the hackathon :)

[Anika Tibrewala]

Thank you so much!

[Valentine Sean Chanengeta]

You are welcome. And thank you for the provision of such an opportunity, I learnt a lot and I am still learning. I am looking forward for other many events in the future.

[Hina-softwareEngineer]

Hi Gracie, I have seen this now and submitted my post a little while ago and i am so worried to see that the mentioned date in artilce is wrong as you are saying 12 Jan utc. I was considering the 13 Jan 11:59 pm PT time from the article.

[Hina-softwareEngineer]

Kindly consider the posts till 11:59PM PT as this was due to the confusion of the dates. As we all have spent many hours on buildling the useful applications.

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

Don't worry! Your submission will be counted because the error was on our end!

[Hina-softwareEngineer]

Thank you so much Gracie for clarifying and organizaing this hackathon :). Looking forward for more hackathons.

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

12 Jan? 😟
I haven't yet submitted and the post was (is) saying till 13th Jan.
And I can see people submitting after 12th as well.

[Gracie Gregory (she/her)]

So sorry. I have made a few errors here. Corrected my comment to reflect the correct information. The important thing is that your project will be counted as long as we received it through 7:59 AM UTC on January 14

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

Thank you so much!

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

Please reply to my query.

[Abdul Samad]

Is there a way to call a realm function from nodejs file using the MongoClient instance. If not, what is the right package realm or realm-web for doing this.

[Joel Lord]

Yes, you can use the realm-web package for this. To call a serverless function called sum with the arguments 2 and 3, you would use the following code:

const functionName = "sum";
const args = [2, 3];
const result = await user.callFunction(functionName, args);

You can find out more about how to use Realm functions in the documentation.

[Abdul Samad]

thanks it worked.

[Abdul Samad]

What I meant by MongoClient instance is the one which I used to query my Atlas database and collections.

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

Hi, I have most of the server side logic for my app inside Realm Functions which I wrote using the UI Editor. How do I show that code in GitHub repo?
Do I create a folder called realm_functions and put all function codes there in separate files?

[Julien]

Hi, you can use the realm-cli and do realm-cli pull to get your project on your disk 😉

docs.mongodb.com/realm/cli/realm-c...

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

Thank you, will try this 🙂

[Manish Goyal]

@thepracticaldev Do we have to make a web app as in website or can we make an android app?

[Joel Lord]

Feel free to use whatever technology you’d like! The more creative, the better 🎉.

As long as you provide all the instructions for our judges to be able to test the application on their own, you can use any programming language or platform that you want.

[Trang Le]

"test the application on their own": Should I provide instructions to use the app as an end user, or a developer?

[简·多伊]

I believe either should be fine. You can deploy your app to a cloud platform like Heroku or Netlify as a live demo and/or provide instructions in your Git repo README for the judges to run & test. Since open source licensing of the app's code is one of the requirements, I assume the judges are developers themselves who will be reviewing code & installing your app anyway.

[简·多伊]

Yup, @joellord 's profile says 'Developer Advocate' 👍
Who I think is one of the judges

[简·多伊]

Can I include and refactor broken/hacky code that I'd written previously? I'd like to try again for this hackathon since I failed the last time. Hopefully this time I can manage to stay focused and build a working app with MongoDB on the backend. This will be my first time learning and working with MongoDB Atlas tools. Please let me know if this is allowed or not. Thanks

[Trang Le]

I'm not from MongoDB but I don't see why not since most apps are built by remixing existing apps. Most hackathon winners have been in the trench for donkey's years, so I think the more hackathons you participate in, the higher chance you'll win.

[简·多伊]

Thanks Trang! It's too late for me to participate 😅
Good luck in the contest! 🙂

[Shaiju T]

@thepracticaldev Can we take part as a team, And its ok to show the working application in github, and in local machine without hosting ?

[Joel Lord]

Hi @shaijut,

Yes, you can definitely submit as a team. The more, the merrier, right? The prize will be sent to the person who posted the submissions, and you will need to work it out as a team.

For the application, it doesn’t need to be hosted anywhere, although you might want to look into Realm Hosting since using multiple services might make the judges happy 😜.

Whether you host the application or not, make sure that you provide detailed instructions on how to set up the application so that the judges can give it a try.

[Shaiju T]

Thanks. 2 question.

1. In automation innovation can we try to automate thinks like mail support to bot based, my application will be security domain based ?

2. Does Mongo db has just key value store like redis, is there any specific product to store large number of links as values, to query faster ?

[Joel Lord]

To your first question, the answer is yes! Anything that uses an Atlas Serveless instance (docs.atlas.mongodb.com/tutorial/cr...) will fit in this category.

For your second question, MongoDB offers a flexible data schema that can accommodate just about any type of data format. The speed of the query will depend on many different factors. I suggest that you start by exploring the data modeling intro from our docs (docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/data-...), or the talk “From Tables to Documents” (youtube.com/watch?v=j9N1dIVmV48).

[Shankar Wagh]

Hello, I have created mongodb account but which cluster i have to select free or any other?
And second question I don't have credit card, is there any other option?
Otherwise I have to leave this hackthon.😥😥

[Joel Lord]

Hi!
You can create a free cluster by following the instructions here: docs.atlas.mongodb.com/tutorial/de.... The free tier will give you access to most of the features that you need to build your application.

Looking forward to seeing your submission!

[Julien]

Hi, free cluster does not require a credit card. I use this one personnaly

[Faith Morante]

Hi! I can't seem to make HTTPS Endpoints work with Postman, I didnt add any additional authorization, and also tried using API Keys and I always get same error response:

{
    "error": "no authentication methods were specified",
    "error_code": "InvalidParameter"
}

[Faith Morante]

I got it now! The function setting for Authentication should be set to System

[Valentine Sean Chanengeta]

If I write code with ENV variables like passwords, how will Mongo judges get those variables so they can run the app?

[Joel Lord]

We will run the application on our own cluster so you don't need to provide us with your credentials.

In order for us to configure our clusters, please provide a sample of the data or the realm application export file (docs.mongodb.com/realm/cli/realm-c...), along with any necessary instructions such as how to configure the ENV variables for us to setup the project.

[Valentine Sean Chanengeta]

The app has another third party service which requires authentication details

[Adhir Kirtikar]

I have the same question...

[Soumya Ranjan Mohanty]

+1 to the question.

[Kacha]

Hi, I'd like some help understanding something in the realm data schema.
In what scenario would we use the relationships.json under the mongo-atlas schema in data-sources?
Why use this relationships file instead of just using embedding or adding a field with an objectId referencing another collection.

I hope I have asked that semi-coherently.

[Joel Lord]

Hi!

I think I would need more information before I can answer this question. Also, for more technical questions, you might want to try to search or post on our community forums (mongodb.com/community/forums/), you will normally get a quicker answer there.

Regarding the use of relationships or embedding fields, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The general rule of thumbs is that if data is accessed together, it should be stored together. You can find out more information about data modeling in our docs (docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/data-...), or watch the talk “From Tables to Documents” (youtube.com/watch?v=j9N1dIVmV48).

I hope this helps.

[Sumedha Mehta]

Hi - I'm from the Realm Team! You're pretty much correct. The relationships defined in Realm let you easily reference fields in another collection to define your relationships instead of having to embed them in your documents. This is especially valuable when using services like Realm's Hosted GraphQL API or Realm Sync because we will automatically resolve the relationship for you without having to do a $lookup or another query.