This project was the recipent of two awards during HACK@UCI 2022: Best Social Good Hack & Best Product Pitch (MAISS)
During this hackathon, we had 36 hours to brainstorm, develop and test our project.
We landed on a simple idea, but one with its own set of complexities and challenges.
The problem was widespread: any regular gym-goer knows the struggle of having to ask if a certain machine was occupied. It becomes a hassle to ask every person using a machine how much time they have left on the machine. We decided that we should develop an app to remedy this problem, in a simple and effective way. Our idea was a mobile web-app that would allow users of a gym to "get in line" for any specific machine, so that there is never any confusion on who gets next dibs.
For our tech stack, we needed to find something that we could all agree on, but at the same time use as a learning experience. For most of our team members, this was their first hackathon, and first project dealing with web dev at a higher sense of complexity. We decided to stick with the classics, HTML/CSS and Javascript for our front-end. For our backend we chose Google Firebase. We chose Firebase because we were aware of its unique strengths and how we could leverage those strengths.
Our front-end skills defintitely saw improvement during this whole project. For most of our team members, this was their first time building a complex and comprehensive web-app, combining front-end and the back-end. We took this hackathon as an opportunity to expand our skills in regards to front-end, and we feel as though we have achieved that goal. The main thing we learned from using Firebase is just how powerful real-time database management and real-time rendering was to the user experience. Our members were so surprised to learn how powerful cloud-based systems were, and how fast they could streamline the app-building process. For example, creating a authenticating users through Firebase took about 10 lines of code, which was incredible in bolstering our development speed and letting us access more complex features.
Another thing that we implemented in this project was the use of TwilioAPI that can send SMS messages to users when they are about to get their requested machine. Since Javascript didn't natively support this API, we had to implement the use of a few other tecnologies, namely Node.js and Express.js. With their powers combined, we were able to add Twilio functionality into our app to send out messages to users.
Overall, we had a lot of fun, learned a lot, and are excited to attend more hackathons in the future with our new knowledge.
