Inspiration
In a world where we are stuck in a small circle of our lives, we forget to pay attention to the people around us like our neighbors. They may be in need of something that we no longer need, help with tasks we may be excellent at, and so on. There are people who lived next door but have never moved beyond casual "Hello"s. We wanted to strengthen the connection between all members of communities by allowing them to help each other in every possible way.
What it does
The app allows members of communities to interact with each other and help in any way they can ranging from exchanging books to tutoring their children. It registers users into the application with their details, allowing them to select how they would like to volunteer to help their local community. This adds them to the list of people who chose to volunteer so people seeking volunteers can contact them through messaging. It also allows volunteers-seeker to post what they want help with, allowing them to use relevant tags to make the find easier.
How we built it
We built "Hopeless-less" first by creating a prototype on Figma. By making the mock design app on Figma, we could divide the responsibilities among our teammates better. After having an outline for our application, we used Microsoft VS Code and Github to collaborate. We used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, React.js to build the web version of the app. For the mobile app, we used React Native. We used Google Firebase as our storage and database solution. We used Netlify and Domain.com to deploy our web app.
Challenges we ran into
While building the mobile and web app, it was a little bit difficult to synchronize two apps to use the same architecture. It required lots of Googling and discussion between team members. There were incompatibilities for Firebase SDK on web and mobile. We had to use two different versions of firebase which used modular and namespaced web versions.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team is proud of creating web and mobile app simultaneously as well as making them unique with support for distinct features on both. Not only that, but we all put in long shifts to make the teamwork. It was rewarding to have been part of an ambitious team that had its expectations high and exceeded them.
What we learned
We all improved so much working on our designated parts, whether it be UI/UX, backend development, or mobile development. We learned how stressful short deadlines can be. For a couple of members, it was their first hackathon, and what a hackathon it was!
What's next for Hopeless-Less
If we had more time, we had planned to add more features such as sorting by distance using zipcodes, reputation for users, intelligent feed suggesting and more. https://github.com/cheesecakeassassin/HOPELESS-LESS
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