TechSpace for The Girls

Spacebase- displays the different topic planets

Inspiration

We’ve been the “only” in the room. TechSpace was born to give women, an underrepresented group in tech a safe, stigma-free place to share struggles, swap tools, and feel seen—especially around mental health. Despite many articles and forums with women expressing feeling lonely in tech, there is still a lack of spaces. No matter what part of their career journey, our TechSpace helps women connect with one another and support each other through both personal and professional growth.

What it does

A “SpacePage” shows topic planets (like Reddit threads). Users post publicly or anonymously, read and sort comments, and add their own. Light moderation, crisis resources, and report/block tools keep the space safe.

How we built it

React + Tailwind + Axios on the front end. FastAPI on the back end. Firebase Auth for login, Firestore for data (threads, comments, profiles). Cursor pagination, tag filters, and per-post public/anon mode. Dev tools: GitHub, VS Code, npm, Axios.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing anonymity with safety, username uniqueness across Firestore, ID token verification + 401 handling, CORS and env setup. Set up of the Axios and connection between Frontend and Backend. Tuning pagination + Firestore indexes for tag filters. Username uniqueness and graceful recovery conflicts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

MVP shipped: sign up/sign in, profile setup, create/read threads, add comments, public/anon toggle, rate limits, and a clean, accessible UI with crisis disclaimers.

What we learned

Clear copy, frictionless reporting, and anonymity options increase sharing. Technically, we learned robust token flows, Firestore indexing, and building cursor-based APIs in FastAPI. Fun and engaging interfaces are sometimes the key to making an app successful or novel, equally as important as the app function. Building a fun, legible UI is as critical as the API-engagement is a feature.

What's next for TechSpace for Girls

Our app plans to implement live audio functions that can be hosted on each planet. We also hope to expand to mentor matching, resource hubs, AI-assisted moderation & safety, multilingual support, reactions/notifications, search (Algolia/Meilisearch), a zoomable SpacePage canvas, and a mobile app with offline-first posting.