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Peter McAree
Peter McAree

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Transforming Teaching with Teachingo - Update #1

This is an update on our #TwilioHackathon project progress - you can see the original post here:


Everything starts with a whiteboard ✍️

Before we began, we wanted to mock out what we expected our UI to look like and how the users might interact with our solution.

Whiteboard mockup of how Teachingo UI looks

Cool. So we understood what we needed from our web application perspective.

Technology Stack Choices

First things first. We had our idea, we kinda know how we want it to look, now we have to actually build it!

I did some initial investigation to find out what Twilio had to offer in terms of examples for web applications interacting with their Video API.

I came across their twilio-video-app-react example which handles a lot out of the box! Awesome!

Since this is a hackathon, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel - so we decided to base our client side application on this repository to allow us to focus on the targeted features for our specific use case.

Built using React and TypeScript, it was music to my ears.

GIF of Brooklyn 99 "Noice!"


Next, we had to decide what to power our client with. We were playing with the idea of building a purely serverless architecture but thought against it since it might introduce unncessary overhead, especially for a hackathon.

Keep it simple - Node.js ft. Express to power our backend API.

This will handle all database interactions, user authentication and more!


Stay tuned for more progress updates from Chloe and myself!

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