Inspiration
Getting tasks done is hard enough as is. In this current day, not everyone has the ability to do their daily chores, especially those who are elderly or have auto-immune disorders. For these people in need, leaving the house to do chores such as grocery shopping is a lose-lose situation. We want to help connect those in need to brave volunteers who can help alleviate some of these pain points in today's crisis.
What it does
We allow those in need to request certain their needs such as groceries, pickup, or even maintenance help around the house. We also allow volunteers to sign up and see people who need the help. The volunteers can choice a person to assist and we help introduce the two parties.
How we built it
We used a React front-end with firebase authentication to handle logins. Through an REST API, we communicated to our Node back-end which is linked up to a MongoDB database with mongoose hosted on Atlas using AWS.
Challenges we ran into
We wanted to learn new libraries such as Formik which gave us some challenges in setting everything up. This created additional issues such as focusing on things that were not crucial to our MVP such as form validation and user authentication. Additionally, we had a small team size which made it difficult to achieve everything we initially set out to do. In hindsight, we should have limited the scope of our project to be more doable within a 24 hour time frame and focused on the crux of what makes our project stand out.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We managed to create a fully operational authentication system and have it communicate with our backend which are hosted on two different servers (firebase and mongodb) which required coordination on the front-end to manage. We are also very proud to get Google Maps API to work and updates to the user's location upon allowing browser location and setting map markers for each person who requests assistance. Additionally, we were able to successfully create objects in our database through a function REST API connected to our front-end.
What we learned
We learned a lot about overall prioritization and project scoping as we realized we had originally taken on too much. Additionally, we learned a variety of libraries that we incorporated into our project such as mongoose, firebase, google maps, formik/yup and Atlas MongoDB.
What's next for SupplyRun
We want to be able to simplify the communication layers between the people in need and volunteers. We were initially looking at the Twilio API's to create either an SMS or in web chat functionality. Additionally, we want to create a more secure environment by potentially hiding some information until those in need verifies the volunteer so that we can create a safer interaction. Also, we would like to implement batch jobs pickup so that volunteers can positively impact as many people as possible in the most efficient manner.
Discord Tommy Sun - Didnt knew#4487 Caroline Liu - Cariberri111#3320
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