This past October marked the 8th installment of the bi-annual Hack Upstate, a hackathon where developers, designers, and innovators from Upstate New York came together to build some seriously awesome stuff. Declan Hopkins and his team attended with a prize-winning project called MyCart, a smart point of sale solution that uses MongoDB's database to eliminate the need for cashiers and registers. The app allows vendors to manage products in a central database, scan barcodes, and use facial recognition technology to identify customers after checkout, providing analytics and statistics to improve business decisions. Despite some technical issues with Python and MongoDB, the team successfully implemented Swift for iOS and achieved a great tech stack. They won a prize for best usage of MongoDB and gained valuable experience that they plan to apply to future projects.