Inspiration

Our vision for this website was built on the foundation of wanting to gain a greater sense of security on and around UC Berkeley. We soon expanded on this idea, and what really inspired us to build a website like Bear Buddies is that we wanted to see greater immersion and intermingling of the UC Berkeley. Given the size and population of campus, we wanted to extend an opportunity for people to build a stronger connection with others in order to establish a sense of inclusion and belonging. We believe that the features of our website in grouping people together is an efficient way in sparking new connections based on mutual interests and hobbies!

What it does

The web app takes in user-input of which event they would like to host and updates the feed with real-time responses. Users can come together and join others within the UC Berkeley community for events whether that being a quick boba run to a good dinner meal.

How we built it

We managed the frontend using HTML, CSS, JS and the backend through Google Cloud's Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

All of us had very little coding experience and everything we were dealing with was new to us. We struggled from how to implement APIs in our project to setting up a Firebase server and even aligning our map with the response list on our web app. Each seemingly simple task for many coders was a challenge for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first time being at a hackathon let alone making something with code in such a short span of time. We're proud that we were courageous enough to throw ourselves out amongst a bunch of passionate hackers and hack away our very own web app.

What we learned

Though we started off with very little coding experience and no hackathon experience, we learned a lot during the hackathon --> basics of web design with html, css, js; implemented google maps javascript api, implemented google's firebase realtime database (!!)

What's next for Bear Buddies

Our next step is to make the map more interactive so the queue of posts shown on the left would actually be placed in pop-ups within pins regarding the specific location of the user's requested location.

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