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All the Small Businesses — By the community, for the community
Our Team
- Adrian Burgos
- Melissa Burisky
- Makenzie Dorsey
- Kasim O'Meally
Inspiration
Inspired by the relatively low amount of small businesses we could name off the top of our heads, we decided to create an application for the small companies that are run in the community, by the community. We are here to advance the development of local companies by promoting their presence on a larger scale.
What it does
All the Small Businesses is an intuitive web application that locates many of the small businesses local to a particular area. Visitors to our application will be able to enter a specific longitude and latitude, and will also have the option to filter whether they are looking for restaurants, coffee shops, clothing stores, and more!
Once the user submits a search request, we utilize the Bing Maps API to find companies of a specific type near their location. Our application then picks out only the small, local businesses to show the user. Our clean UI makes our content easily digestible and allows for accessibility across all media sizes.
How we built it
Our web application was made with the Angular Framework which greatly allowed for the use of TypeScript and NodeJS. While none of our team members are particularly experienced in these technologies, this was a challenge we were eager to take on. Our application includes the use of the Bing Maps API, Maven, Excel, data.world, HTML, and Bootstrap CSS.
Challenges we ran into
There were a plethora of challenges at the beginning of the process regarding the backend development of our application. Our initial process was to use Java and SpringBoot but that route did not come to fruition due to how we wanted to represent the data from our Bing Maps API. Since the data we collected included most companies within the area, we created a specific algorithm that would allow us to pinpoint and highlight the small businesses included within the bunch.
Another challenge we ran into was working with this semi-familiar technology (TypeScript) and navigating how we can use the language to power most of the backend of our development process. We created various components for the front-end development and fully utilized the object-oriented capabilities of TypeScript throughout the entire application. Along the way we had many challenges with lambda functions not working as planned, the need to reroute from the initialized AppComponent to another component, and creating a database using Excel to wrap up our entire program.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud to declare that we have had very few merge conflicts due to the use of GitHub branches to mitigate pushing changes directly to the master branch. The use of the Bing Maps API also presented a challenge due to our unfamiliarity with it but we were able to read over the documentation together and overcome those challenges.
Our final product is better than we first dreamed of and has more than the features we were aiming for. After a long battle with TypeScript, we were successfully able to locate small, local businesses and help spread awareness to create an audience for those that may be struggling to compete with larger chains.
What we learned
Our biggest takeaway from the experience is that there is no better time to seize opportunities than right now. Even though we all had little or no experience with TypeScript, we were able to create this application that exceeded our expectations and has the potential to help people. We learned that staying task-oriented will lead to a successful team but so will a couple of hours of sleep. We leaped over the challenges we had with SpringBoot, Angular, TypeScript Lambdas, and APIs, and already have plans on how we can improve our application.
What's next for All the Small Businesses
What's even better than visiting a small business? Spreading the word! The next development for our program would be to implement a review program where customers of a particular company can review their experience and spread the word to their friends and family. This feature would also allow users to create their own accounts and 'subscribe' to their favorite small businesses so that they can always know to visit when back in the area. We would also work to make searching easier by adding more general ways to search than coordinates, such as by City or Zip Code.
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