VoteVault: Our Journey from a Lunchtime Idea to dApp

This is a submission for the Build Better on Stellar: Smart Contract Challenge:
Build a dApp

What I Built

VoteVault - Because, who said voting has to be boring?

VoteVault is a secure, transparent and open-source voting platform built on the Stellar blockchain. We wanted to create something useful in the blockchain space — a platform that allows users to create, participate and verify any types of votes. Using Stellar Smart Contracts for secure and verifiable voting processes, and an Angular frontend for a responsive UI.

Demo

• Check out VoteVault in action: VoteVault
• We also created a predefined vote, where we'd like all of you to engage on: Sample Vote or copy the voteID: 4a6cdc19-33ec-4f6d-adf1-a71a30370027 🔥

My Code

• Explore the code on GitHub: VoteVault Repository
• Our repo includes a README going into further detail and is licensed under MIT.

Journey

This journey is not just about what we build, its about who we are and how we build it.

The Team: Cyril & Daniel

We are Cyril and Daniel, two developers with passion for learning and taking on challenges in the most unconventional ways ;). Both of us are apprentices in software development in Switzerland. I'm in my fourth and final year, Daniel is in his third year. We may be early in our careers but we’re already making waves (sometimes literally, lol, since we worked on this project mostly while on vacation).

The project started during a lunchtime at our company. Full of excitement (and probably too much coffee) we decided to do the Stellar Smart Contracts Challenge the best way we could.

As said, we wanted to do something different than crypto or token projects and also keep the UI simple and straight-forward without any fancy animations 😆. Also we wanted to show, that Stellar Smart Contracts can be used for literally anything, not only crypto related platforms.

For the first two weeks, we developed from home, but the pace was a bit slow. The ideas were there but not as much as when we hit the road for our vacations where we also refactored a lot of code we wrote in the first two weeks. We also created full CI/CD for deployment, clean code and testing. We don't have full test coverage yet and will implement it in the near future, also we will develop automated deployment for the Smart Contract if it would be needed. Since it won't be changed that much! 🚀

The Real Journey Begins: Vacation Time!

Once we were on vacation things really started to go on. Daniel was coding from Italy, where late-night sessions turned into early mornings, without him even noticing. Italy is known for its relaxation, sea and pizza, but Daniel said that “the flow” waits for nobody.

While I was in the sun of Sri Lanka. In the beautiful nature and tasty food, I also was able to stay focused on Stellar smart contracts and Rust. Balancing blockchain with beach stuff is not easy but I think we did a good job!

Our communication relied mostly on Discord where we talked about our ideas, our code and sent snapshots of our remote workstations to each other. We learned a lot about Stellar, Web 3.0, improved our skills in Rust and became really good at refactoring as we constantly got new ideas (prolly because of the weather and vibe).

Oh yeah, did I say we took some snapshots on our vacation? Look at the banner again. 😊

Well... what started as a lunchtime idea turned into a project we’re very proud of. VoteVault isn't just a dApp — its the result of a lot of work, late nights and great vacations. We both were able to learn a lot about Stellar and how the future of web might look, not only crypto, but also other sustainable platforms like VoteVault. 😉

We hope you love VoteVault as much as we do.

As two young developers at the start of our careers, we’d be absolutely thankful to participate in the Meridian conference, if we are lucky to win. Going to the meridian conference would give us a lot reputation in our early careers and very much experience for our future in the software industry.

Feel free to explore our code, check out the demo, and let us know what you think.

Btw. Daniel showed me the song he listened to the most while working on this
project: How to listen to this Album - Stereoclip

I created a relatable meme of what I funnily sometimes experienced while working at this project. xD

We will continue to work on the project till the due date of the challenge on the 18. August. As said, we'd be happy on your feedback of what can be improved on our Discussion. 🙌

Additional Prize Categories: Super Sustainable

We think, transparent and fair voting is very important for governance and decision making or getting peoples real opinions on any topic. This makes our dApp a good candidate for the Super Sustainable category.

Team Members

• @cyrilkurmann
• @danieljancar

Cheers,
Daniel and Cyril