Bridge to Belonging

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from our own personal stories as descendants of immigrants to the United States. As first-generation college students, our parents had troubles finding locations that were accessible to them through language. This motivated us to create a platform that listed accessibility features, such as language availability, handicap accessibility, and technical accessibility, to help people find more inclusive spaces. Our aim is to provide a resource for anyone needing accessibility options to find an inclusive community.

What it does

We created a platform that lists the accessibility details of each location and helps connects people with accessibility needs. Based on the accessibility options that the user selects, it finds locations near them that have those options.

How we built it

Bridge to Belonging is a web application built on top of SolidStart, an experimental new full-stack framework supporting SolidJS. SolidJS is a technology heavily inspired by ReactJS. Our database is hosted in Firebase Firestore, with additional image storage from Firebase Storage. The web application is deployed to Firebase Hosting, with rewrites to a Cloud Run container. The non-exhausitive list of technologies used in or to build Bridge to Belonging is:

SolidJS/SolidStart with Typescript32
Firebase Auth/Firestore/Storage/Hosting
Google Cloud Platform Artifact Registry/Cloud Run Platform
Google Maps/Places APIs

Challenges we ran into

Learning a whole new language while needing to still output a cohesive project proved to be a challenge that put a lot of stress and initiative on our minds. We had to learn to work and learn fast enough to code a program that wouldn't be full of errors. Additionally, since there were a few beginners on the team, learning about project management and Github and coding a project like this in general took some time. We often felt like we were falling behind, and many of the details and inner workings of the code continue to give us issues and/or require large chunks of time to break down and understand.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The whole team was working with a completely new language, and we are all proud of the product that we created. We each independently worked on aspects of the code and were able to seamlessly connect all the parts with little to no issues. We managed our time and the sections very well, and overall, we all feel very glad that we did what we did.

What we learned

We learned a lot of things for this project! Firstly, you don't need to know the whole language to start coding something. Learning is a continual process, and learning as you go and about the topics relating to your project can help narrow in the learning process. Additionally, we learned what it's like to work on a team and how to collaborate with each other to make sure all of our code works together to make a cohesive project. Understanding each other's strengths and weaknesses allows us to help each other out and compensate for what others may still need help on.

What's next for Bridge to Belonging

Fleshing out our profile page is something we would like to do. In addition, the Forum was a rushed part of the project and needs a lot of added details (such as a remove button and making it look uniform to the rest of the web app). We would later like to expand by adding more categories and user data so that users can more accurately connect with their peers.