Troki

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What it does

What teen wouldn't spend under 15 minutes shovelling their neighbour's driverway for $5? What homeowner wouldn't take that cheap & convenient offer? Enter Troki, an app-based platform connecting nearby, eager teens with neighbours in need of yard work. Short for Trochilidae – the biological family name for the fast & agile Hummingbirds – our app intends to provide a convenient and efficient way for teens or any individual to earn some very quick cash and to provide a cheap yard/driveway service for neighbours.

Business Viability

Convenience sells in the modern world! With our app, we hope to bring convenience to a task often viewed as boring and time-consuming. As outlined by this article, the flexibility and simplicity of providing teens a platform for yard jobs is a great opportunity for growth. Additionally, our app helps to limit the cons of a tough start-up, competition, and unexpected conditions to make it the perfect tool for teens and homeowners alike!

How we built it

Using a MERN stack, we divided our work based on specialties. 2 of us established a solid back-end for job listings, authentication and distance gauging with Google Maps API, 1 of us created a smooth mobile front-end which displayed a compact dashboard for all searching functions, and the last one oversaw the entire project (managing back-end, revising for clarity, etc.). In addition to using GitHub to exchange files, we also used VS Code's Live Share extension which allowed us to simultaneously code as a team.

Challenges we ran into

Although our respective skillsets made things efficient, integrating the two ends was our greatest challenge. Despite our collective planning through using Asana and a UML, we found that a few of our routers were not smoothly aligned to connect to the front-end. Additionally, we did not test for bugs throughout and had quite a few during the integration process.

Nevertheless, we were dedicated to completing our submission as best we could and continued to persevere through Live Share hosting. Through each debug, we were one step closer to creating the business viable product we hoped to make. We're most proud of the process we took to get to this point.

What we learned

From APIs and databases to Asana and teamwork, the entire team learned a ton at HTN. Although we had plenty of struggles, especially with integration, we knew that all of us shared an equal passion and used those struggles to learn and grow. Programming's a constant process of learning and we hope to continue our journey at more Hackathons (and hopefully at HTN 2022)!

What's next for Troki

Built as a convenient mobile app, we hope to expand our functionalities to make it a more immersive and enjoyable experience! Apart from further improvements to visual styling, we hope to expand our customization options to include in-depth profiles, better globalization, and automated phone message pairing. With these improvements, we hope to open our app to the public as a viable mobile app to make lives easier and more convenient for nearly all groups!

Built With

Submitted to

Hack the North 2021

Created by

Came up with the idea, worked on backend, created the presentation video

Jeremy Lee
I was working on the backend. I was mentoring 2 other people for whom Node.js, Express.js, and MongoDB was the first time using the technology. We designed our code in accordance with high cohesion - loose coupling, single responsibility and dependency injection principles.

Vitalii O.
Worked on backend using node.js & express.js, created presentation materials

Jesse Huang
I worked on the frontend of the app. I used a figma mockup and implemented the app with react native.

Steven Bai
Student Web Developer