carrier

carrier: your favorite newsletter (not actually delivered by carrier pigeons)
GIF
app demo displaying the groups, posts, past issues, and submission pages

Inspiration

Quarantine has made it harder to keep in touch with friends/family/loved ones. Social interaction is important for mental health, and ensuring one has a strong support network. Carrier is a newsletter web app that facilitates social interaction, allowing people to stay involved with their loved ones in an easy way. Note: no carrier pigeons were harmed over the course of this hackathon.

What it does

Through the carrier web app, you are able to create carrier groups. Each group can create a curated newsletter; custom questions can be added and strung together for each week's post. These questions are then sent out to all the members; once each members fills out their responses to that week's question, the carrier post is "delivered" (via email) to each member. Members of the group can then read and reply to their friends' responses on the web app!

How we built it

The frontend was built using React, the backend using Node.js. MongoDB was chosen as the database due to its flexibility. The app was deployed using Netlify and Heroku. The initial app wireframes were made using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

Working on a hackathon project remotely proved to be quite challenging! We tried to combat this by doing scheduled check-ins, and jumping on calls to sync whenever necessary. Other challenges we faced included configuring breadcrumbs for our web app, and integrating the frontend/backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having fun while working on this project together!

What we learned

There are a lot of considerations that must be made when deploying a web app, such as CORS origins, database connection IP addresses, redirect URLs, etc. CSS is still not our passion.