Life Voyager

Inspiration

A public bucket list

What it does

It's a social media application without the BS. you can post and you can rate your own experiences for others to see and learn, without following or comments bogging down the truth and anonymity reinforces the lack of hostility. (remember, anonymous people can't leave mean comments)

How we built it

We used Flask and MongoDB to power the site, with each post being a document in a Collection for easy searching through the data

Challenges we ran into

A need for censorship. With our intentional anonymity comes the problem of ensuring people can't anonymously post mean things. We had to ensure we had an effective profanity filter. Learning how to host a server not locally was new to all of us. We spent a lot a lot of time learning how to and setting up docker and a WSGI server that ended up not being needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the first hackathon for all 4 of us, and half of our team is in high school. I'm proud that we have something to submit. Our website looks very good for just raw CSS and HTML; together, we learned Git (Docker before realizing it is not compatible with Vercel), Vercel, and MongoDB, and this was my first time hosting a website.

What we learned

We learned that it is simply possible. From the outside, hackathons are intimidating, and the long line on Saturday morning did not help. Despite this, all of us came to our first hackathon (One of our members from Hawaii), and even if we didn't win, we were able to make something, and I thought a finished product would be a stretch just a few days ago.

What's next for Life Voyager

Starting as soon as we had the website up, we asked just about everyone we knew to make posts while we were working, and it was fun and exciting and always a little interesting trying to figure out who was who. Life Voyager is not going to be a billion-dollar company. But it can make my day a little bit better when I check it, and I hope the same is true for everyone else. In terms of technical development, better UI, expanding posts for more text, and an improved search engine is definitely on the way after a LONG nap.