Earlier this year, alongside our friends at DevPost, we launched the Cosmonic Distributed WebAssembly Hackathon and encouraged you all to get creative with Wasm and the Cosmonic platform.
We asked you to take your ideas, whether something that would improve your daily work, something that could replace functionality in an existing application, or be the beginnings of a potential startup and implement them using WebAssembly, hosted on Cosmonic.
We saw hundreds turn out to build hacks, side hustles and creative ideas on Cosmonic, and to snag a share of our $4,500 prize pot -- and we weren't disappointed!
The results are in!
We were blown away by all the submissions but, without doubt, our top 3 are in a galaxy of their own. Click the links to hear about the projects and build processes in their own words.
Champion Submission and Winner of $2500 ...🥁...
Congratulations to Dog the Bug Hunter (see what they did there?) by jclmnop - an automated vulnerability scanning tool, built on Cosmonic.
Dog the Bug Hunter (a bit like Dog the Bounty Hunter, but with bug bounties) by jclmnop
What an amazing submission. We expected our entrants to create actors but jclmnop went a few steps further and created 2 custom providers, too - super impressive.
jclmnop's inspiration for this application originated from his passion for bug bounties on sites like HackerOne. The modular nature of wasmCloud makes it easy to add new scanning modules and so he created this automated vulnerability scanning tool, designed to be instantly scalable on demand, useful if there are many targets to scan.
It works by sending a scan request to the API endpoint (after signing up/signing in and getting a JWT). Then, when it's finished scanning, users simply retrieve reports with the /reports endpoint. It can be sent to a whole list of targets and the tool will scan them all in the background.
Submission Highlights
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This was, by far, the most technically accomplished entry. jclmnop impressed us with his ability to not only create actors but developed 2 custom providers to-boot:
- Endpoint-Enumerator: a multi-threaded (more cost-efficient than single-threaded) provider that utilizes a callback system to mitigate RPC timeout. The orchestrator actor sends a request to the provider, and once the provider has finished enumeration it makes an RPC call back to the actor.
- Surreal DB: there was no existing capability provider for Surreal DB so our winner built their own to take care of authentication and storage capabilities, and to smooth reporting processes. Impressive.
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This entry came in closest to our 4 main criteria: technical implementation, design, potential real-world impact and creativity.
GitHub link - https://github.com/jclmnop/dog-the-bug-hunter
Congratulations, JC!
Runner Up: Dr Write by Kwok Keung Lam
I think many of us will wish we had this tool when we were writing our college theses. Essentially, it speeds up essay writing, enabling students to put the finishing touches to their essays in minutes.
ChatGPT is creating quite a buzz right now and so it was great to see an idea designed to capitalize on the promise of AI. Congratulations to Kwok Keung Lam for their team-based research tool and for winning our second prize of $1000. Built on Cosmonic and designed to harness the new wave of AI-powered content creation, Dr. Write gathers all your cool research ideas, stores them in well-organized folders and allows one-click copying of inline citations, A.I. prompts and APA biographies. Pretty sweet.
GitHub link - https://github.com/creator-ms/dr-write
Submission Highlights
- We love the way the team tested NATS to trigger a separated application to fetch data. This "inter-constellation" functionality will be useful for large applications.
- The team also demonstrated the clever use of interlinking actors which allows fine control of microservices that may be managed by different departments.
- We love the real-world possibilities that this tool represents - after all, who actually enjoys gathering references for reports?
Congratulations Kwok Keung Lam!
Honorable Mention: MeXtension by Nikita Batalov and Julia Prozorova
Finally, congratulations to Nikita and Julia for their AI-assisted chat bot, MeXtension, which wins them $500 and an honorable mention. This application is a language model-driven system that integrates into chats to make message-writing easier.
The system integrates into web clients for messaging applications, Telegram and WhatsApp, by means of a google-chrome extension. It adds a new input window next to the chat box to let you process your message with APIs such as cohere, ChatGPT or Microsoft translator without leaving the page.
GitHub link - https://github.com/The-Incremental-Experience/cosmonic-extension
Submission Highlights
- We love how MeXtension is designed to streamline the user experience. Messaging is such a central part of our lives, it's exciting to see how Wasm can transform it further.
- The opportunity to change an actor (cohere/ChatGPT/etc) at runtime is extremely useful and fits in well with the distributed computing framework.
A final thank you....
A huge thank you to all those who took the time to share their feedback on Cosmonic and the user experience during your travels around the Cosmonic universe. Every single suggestion will be used to improve our platform and the user experience for other developers. Everyone who submitted feedback won a richly-deserved "Most Valuable Feedback" prize