Royal Hackaway V4
Myself and my teammates, along with some other members of the Solent Computing Society attended Royal Hackaway V4; this was a virtual hackathon, so all of us had to attend virtually from our homes. This made the development of the project rather cumbersome; as although we utilized the standard technology stack which we use - almost daily - the issue of communication yielded an inconvenience; however we prevailed.
For our project, my team had decided to create a database technology; the idea for the structure of the database, was my own, and the idea had actually come to mind a few weeks prior to the event. The design of this database, implements a skip amount, to define the gaps between elements; this is a useful strategy, as it allows for smaller file sizes whilst still enforcing the structure of the database. But what would we name this database technology? After some debate, we decided on calling it FlitDB, as the word flit is defined as to "move swiftly and lightly", which we believe fits in perfectly with the structure of this database technology, as the introduction of a skip amount yields a swift read time of the database. With that in mind, the database mostly revolves around the ability for its structure to be reconstructed upon the reading and writing of its values. By having instructions embedded into the literal structure of the database, the execution at runtime calculates the overall sizing, and ranges of the data stored in the database, resulting in a small size for the database interpretation library, as well as the database file size as well.
The language that we chose to develop the database technology in was written in C++ as we wanted to have a fast and performant library, which could be dynamically linked to; by other applications. Myself, being the only member of my team that had any experience in developing with C++, had to teach the other members of the team about all the quirks of the syntax of C++, this proved a fun experience as I enjoyed helping the other members learn the language. Throughout the development of the project, the limited time frame did present some issues with how much we could achieve, in a single weekend; however, we reached the submission time with some working functions, which: read, and write; to the database. Once we submitted the project, the dreaded wait for the review of all the submissions ocurred... After a few hours the judging had finished. Unsure of our position, in relation to the results; we watch the winning teams be presented - one after the other; all except one of the result had been given out. The only award left to give was the "overall winner" of the entire event. Suddenly, our project name was read out; with the branding of being the "overall winners" of the entire event. We were ecstatic, all of our hard work had paid off. Our team were winners; and we all had won an assortment of prizes, to merit our hard work. Overall the event was a fun, and interesting competition, I know that we all finished the event with the glee of being winners, and we all hope to attend, and compete in many more events like this.
Later, Solent University decided to publish an article, about our winnings:
https://www.solent.ac.uk/news/solent-students-win-first-place-at-royal-hackaway