BeBetter

Inspiration

As busy college students, we're always looking for ways to find some joy in doing our seemingly endless and tedious homework assignments. 😔 We need to be to diligent in our studies, but it's also fun to bet on your friends. 😼 Why not be productive with the added thrill of gambling and a little friendly competition? 🤓

What it does

BeBetter is just like any other to-do list app, except all your friends can see your tasks and place bets on when they think you'll complete them. You can earn currency by successfully completing your tasks and/or by accurately predicting when your friends will complete their tasks. This encourages productivity while also gamifying the experience to have fun with friends!

Features

To-do list
User and friend system
Betting and currency reward algorithm
Leaderboard
AI verification of task completion w/ Gemini
Dark mode 😎

How we built it

We set up a PostgreSQL database with Neon, a backend server with Node.js, and a frontend with React and MaterialUI. We hand-built authentication and developed our own time-sensitive betting and currency reward algorithm. We also created a task completion system using multer for file uploads and Gemini for AI-powered verification. We hosted our website using an Apache server deployed to an AWS-ec2 instance with a domain link from GoDaddy.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues with circular dependencies between frontend and backend with regards to testing certain features. Furthermore, since there were multiple people working on the same feature, we also dealt with inconsistencies in the code that lead to various problems e.g. the backend API being changed without the frontend devs knowing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing our team is proud of is the fact that we all expanded beyond our roles and essentially each worked on various aspects of both the frontend and the backend. Additionally, we used new, unfamiliar technologies and were able to learn a lot throughout this experience!