To test it live, visit: https://spark-plug.herokuapp.com/
We all went into NewHacks2020 with very specific goals in mind: all of them were to do with learning something new. For Sameer, it was to further his grasp on front end development. For Zaid; it was to learn about APIs, JavaScript, and React.js. We were all extremely new to the hackathon scene, and we're very proud of our project, Spark Plug, or as we like to call it (colloquially), the car matchmaking program!
Our planning process was long and tiring, but crucial to the development of the most suitable application to push our skills to the limit given the time restriction without exceeding it. We took most of Saturday cycling between a couple different ideas we had, mapping out the pros and cons, and flow-charting the different difficulties we may encounter.
We finally decided on Spark Plug, but even we couldn't predict how difficult this project would actually be for us. We had to pick up HTML and CSS, and faced beginner issues for a little while. The real time sink began sucking at around 9 p.m. on Saturday. We spent hours stuck on seemingly helpless problems, but it honestly only added to the satisfaction when we bypassed them. Most notably, we learned and used the fetch() API function on JS to push POST requests to websites and get back necessary information. Throughout this process, we faced hours upon hours of time's worth in bugs and other issues. We spent numerous hours (assisted by mentors) getting the entire framework to function, bypassing issues such as fetch's settings' errors, and Google Chrome's "cors" protocol, which blocked POST requests unless we resorted to opaque structures.
In the end, Spark Plug was a success (although it can still be improved!) and was programmed in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, alongside the use of PostMan for testing, and ParseHub for web scraping.