About the Project

Target Tracks

most likely meme startup
lowkey actually kind of good
i'm just a chill guy

Inspiration

I’ve always had a hard time remembering to reach out to people I meet. After talking to my friends, I realized that most of them had the same problem. To address it, I had been using a messy spreadsheet to keep track of contact information, but it wasn’t the seamless solution I was looking for. Together, Alex and I decided to bring the idea of Poke to life.

What it Does

Poke helps users reconnect with the people they know by sending reminders. Users can choose to "poke" or reach out to a contact or "pass" to snooze the reminder for another time. It’s designed to make maintaining connections easy and engaging.

How We Built It

We built Poke using:

Firebase for authentication and backend database services.
Firestore as our database for storing user data and contacts.
React for the frontend.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and TypeScript for creating clean, responsive webpages.
Render for deployment to production.

The backend connects the front end to Firestore to store and retrieve data seamlessly.

Challenges We Ran Into

Firestore Read Limit: One night, I ran over the read limit for our free Firestore database, which significantly slowed down development.
LinkedIn API: We wanted to allow users to sign in with LinkedIn and automatically query their connections. However, the LinkedIn API requires approval to use, which involves proving we are a legitimate business with a website, address, and LinkedIn page. The approval process also takes considerable time.
SendGrid Integration: We wanted to implement reminder emails, but SendGrid requires a registered business email with a custom domain, which we didn’t have at the time.

Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

Successfully setting up endpoint protection for our Firestore database to ensure data security.
Allowing users to upload their contacts via CSV for a streamlined experience.
Deploying to production on Render, making the app accessible to the public.

What We Learned

How to use Render for deployment.
The importance and setup of endpoint protection for databases.
How to integrate authentication into a React project effectively.

What's Next for Poke

Releasing the webpage to the public to collect user feedback.
Implementing the reminder email feature to notify users about their contacts.
Adding a feature to prioritize contacts with upcoming birthdays or significant events, so they appear at the top of the reminder list.
Exploring ChatGPT integration to provide smart suggestions for reconnecting with contacts.