Inspiration
We wanted to create a social media app that allows travelers to both post their traveling stories online while also giving reviews about their experiences to improve other traveler experiences.
What it does
It allows users to post video stories of themselves while traveling, as well as rate their experiences from various companies. Furthermore, we plan to implement a feature that allows companies to advertise themselves on the platform and receive constructive criticism so they can directly interact with their customer base.
How we built it
We originally wanted to create a mobile app, but ultimately ended up deciding on a web application since we were slightly more experienced in making those.
For the front end, we decided to learn React.js for building interactive user interfaces and managing state efficiently. Furthermore, we used redux for state management, which would be useful for handling user authentication and app-wide data. We also used Bootstrap for styling and customization of the website. For the back end, we used node.js along with express.js to allow us to retrieve user information and put it into a PostgreSQL database. And we also used Amazon S3 to host video/image data posted by users. Lastly, we used Docker to create containers for testing.
Challenges we ran into
Docker was one of the biggest issues since all of us had very little experience with it. Also we ran two components, one for frontend and one for backend and that ended up causing problems when the two needed to communicate, and we couldn’t resolve the issue. Specifically, we ran into an issue where App.js (a necessary file to implement ReactJS) would only open index.html regardless of the route. In an attempt to resolve this, we tried various approaches like adding a separate ExpressJS router class or directly calling other routes through ExpressJS’s app.get() method, but none of the attempts worked.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We successfully set up a more complex stack architecture than we have used before, and some of us got practical experience with several new languages like React, Javascript (Node and Express), and SQL.
What we learned
We learned that we may want to choose a slightly less complex tech stack the next time due to the limited time constraint and continuous mental strain from continuous programming.
What's next for Travel-In
We plan to continue our project even outside of Hack the Map to hopefully improve and make the app deployable. We will likely simplify the tech stack due to the challenges we faced with our current tech stack.
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