Do you remember going to those youth conferences when you were younger?

I do!

I loved them!

In Idaho 4-H, there's an annual conference known as the "State Teen Association Convention," though, admittedly, when I attended, it was known as "Teen Conference." Essentially, it's a conference focused on giving youth from around the state the opportunity to explore what opportunities exist after high school. Youth get to spend about four days on campus at the University of Idaho, and explore various career- and education-focused "tracks."

But what would a youth-conference be, without some social activities and competition?

Idaho "STAC" has a number of social activities and competitions in addition to the educational portions to help bring youth across the state together and help them build new connections. One of the competitions that happens throughout the conference is what's known as "district competitions."

What are the districts, and what are the district competitions?

Well, the state of Idaho is broken into four regional districts: Northern, Southern, Central, and Eastern. The districts help keep some organization across the state, and at STAC, they are the dividing line(s) for youth meetings.

Throughout the conference the districts compete against one another for points in district competitions. After all, who doesn't like a little good-humored, friendly competition? Now, to be honest, I don't think that there's any specific "prize" to come out of winning, but it's a lot of fun.

There are competitions focusing in a few key areas including creativity (photo contest, skit performances) and healthy living (skit/dance performances).

The challenge...

The photo competition is always an interesting challenge to host. It ends up becoming something of a technical challenge to administer since there's no "effective" way to collect the photos into one place. In years past all forms of systems have been used; everything from Facebook with hashtags, to public Google Drives, email, and more... It's been a pain!

Last year something dawned on me, we could create something a little more interesting!

What if we created a simple little web-app to allow the youth to upload the photos they take for the competition, and made it a requirement for the youth to agree to a photo-consent-release. So that's what we got started on!

The Solution:

I spent some time a few months back doing some research on what we could use for an effective photo storage system. I wanted to use an open-source project that would allow API-based access to upload photos, and whose management is simple, intuitive, and without too many frills. I did some poking around, and playing with different services on a $5/month Linode (love those things for testing, by-the-way), and I finally landed on Lychee for a couple of reasons:

• There's a terrific, and simple docker-compose configuration provided by LinuxServer.io
• The API is VERY WELL documented, and exceedingly simple
• There's already a Python Lychee client
• The user interface is very simple and focused without too many frills

Using Lychee as the "back-end storage" for this project, I can create a nice "wrapper" on the front to make an easy web-app to allow youth delegates to upload their photos. To do that, I can use my slick little Python/React.js integrated web-server pairing.

Want to see what it's looking like?

Other Perks:

Pretty early on in this project's investigation, I met a 4-H'er who is actually learning about some programming, and so we've been working together on developing the web-front-end interface for youth.

I've got quite a bit more fun stories to tell about how we're using my GitLab and Jenkins instances to help us keep this project moving, but that will be coming a little later. That said, take a look at the consent form that we've built, and the dark-mode that we were able to build!