HelpOut

Inspiration

As a team, we’ve been disheartened at the extent to which COVID lockdowns have shut down local communities. In many places, it’s completely impossible to interact with your neighbours without breaking lockdown regulations. We strongly believe that this challenge needs to be overcome to create a strong post-COVID recovery.

What it does

A way to connect with your local community during and after lockdown, helping alleviate uncertainty and allowing people to help eachother out. Our service gives users the opportunity to make new connections with people from their suburbs. They can post and comment together in a public forum, with public contact information for further inquiries.

How we built it

We pulled together a number of technologies in our production process. The decision to use a web-based approach was mainly due to accessibility concerns; the percentage of people with access to web browsers greatly outweighs the percentage of those with Android or iOS. We started by comparing UI designs and picking JavaScript libraries. Our final action as a group was creating a Database Schema and delegated tasks through Discord. All four of us worked on and off during our 24 hours, chipping away at the project.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest shortcoming was our own ambition. We had tons of features planned, and spent way too many hours tweaking UI components. Furthermore, not a single person in our team had much JavaScript experience. This meant we really couldn’t foresee what troubles we might come upon when implementing new features, and ended up falling for a couple too many sunk-cost fallacies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re honestly pretty proud of how far we carried this project. None of us have ever worked on a project together before, and we all expected to have far more trouble communicating & delegating.

What we learned

We learned how to work together effectively as a team, as well as pull together a variety of technologies to create a working product under time pressure.