HelpingHand

💡 Inspiration

We wanted to create a one-stop-shop for computer science students wanting to learn python, without having to sift through google, StackOverflow, and the documentation for answers. While there are solutions like Kite or GitHub Copilot, neither are available to act as a personal coding assistant where you can ask questions such as: "What is a for loop?" or "How do I write an if statement?".

📱 What it does

HelpingHand is an online IDE that is made to assist newcomers to computer science with coding! HelpingHand can answer all your programming-related questions (and maybe some off-topic ones too) and writing solutions for you. If you need help debugging your program, HelpingHand can also help debug it for you!

🛠 How we built it

• React.js: We used react.js to create the main site
• OpenAI's Codex & GPT-3: We used these services for our interactive code generation and question-answer features
• Flask: We used Flask for the API server
• Repl.it: We used Repl.it to host the Python backend

🛑 Challenges we ran into

• Creating an interactive shell that allowed for seamless input/output between the client and our backend.
• Creating a complex API that would allow us to add lots of functions to our web client.
• Creating a system for managing files and folders

✅ Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Writing a React.js site, we mostly make Flutter apps or Unity games and we wanted to try and change it up a bit
• Creating our own Python backend that executes the code and actively handles input/output
• Creating our own API
• Creating our own file structure for the users and allowing them to use multiple files for their development
• Providing the users with their own cloud storage and file manager which would allow them to use multiple files for their project.

📖 What we learned

• Multithreading in Python
• Subprocesses in Python
• Postman
• Using Flask
• Using React.js was a new experience for us

🤔 What's next for HelpingHand

• Add different themes
• Integrate documentation for keywords in a tooltip like fashion
• Implement user accounts to allow for online saving of projects
• Monetize, Monetize, Monetize

🖼 Gallery

TBA

💻 Lines of Code

37.5k LOC for the react website, 402 for the python API & backend.

🙇‍♂️ Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Hack the North for the opportunity to come up with and create HelpingHand, we would also like to thank OpenAI for Codex and GPT-3.