Connected

Inspiration

I was inspired by the app BeReal and how it is able to bring people together and share pictures throughout the day. I wanted to build something similar but more curated to keeping friend groups intact over long distances.

What it does

I designed a project which releases a daily prompt such as "show a picture of something good you ate today" and then users can take a picture that they think fits the prompt and at the end of the day, the app will create a collage of all your friends' pictures.

How I built it

For the front end of the app, I used Vanilla JS, HTML, and CSS. For the backend, I used Python and Flask. I also used Amazon S3 to upload the pictures and store the collages so that they are accessible to all users. To deploy the app, I used Heroku.

Challenges I ran into

I had a lot of struggles throughout all the steps of the project. At first it was very hard to store the photos uploaded by users locally and create a collage out of them. The upload function wasn't working as intended. Then, I had trouble hosting the application on cloud services. The first cloud platform I used was Vercel and was having a lot of issues since my app used Flask as a backend. So I switched over to using Heroku. I also had trouble switching from uploading the photos locally to having them upload into the Amazon S3 bucket that I created for this project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This was my first time creating a full stack application and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I used databases for the first time and also deployed an app for the first time. At the end of the day, I am happy that an application I created is able to be viewed by anyone on the web and that I now have the knowledge and tools to do it again.

What I learned

I knew how to code in Python previous to doing this hackathon, but this was the first time I used Flask to create a backend in Python. I also learned a lot about databases and how to create them and integrate them into your web app. Finally, the most important tool I learned was deploying a web app. At first, I only knew how to run my applications on a local host, but now I can create a public server to host my projects.

What's next for Connected

I wanted to initially create an iOS app for Connected, but decided against it since that would take a lot longer than 36 hours. But I hope in the future to continue building upon its functionality and make one day making it into an app.