Carter

us :)

Inspiration

We loved the medieval theme, and we wanted to make a project that could both push our limits with Google's services and be enjoyable to code. We came up the idea with vintage post cards!

What it does

Carter dynamically creates a vintage post card based on the user input. The user logs in using Google's Gmail OAuth, and then can proceed to the dashboard. The user then enters their personal information, such as email, phone number, and desired location, and it fills out the post card.

The cool part about Carter is it's integration with Google maps and Google's Natural Language Processing API. The user enters a location (the Eiffel tower, the One World Trade Center, etc.) and Carter uses the Google Maps API to grab the top-rated image for the location.

Carter then grabs the reviews for the location and uses Google's Natural Language Processing sentiment analysis to return the highest quality review. The highest quality review is defined with a score greater than 0.5 and the highest magnitude available, after all, what fun would a boring review be?

All the post cards created are stored in Google's firebase storage where they are linked to the logged in user. They can be retrieved at any time from the home page.

Carter is also linked to Twilo! You can send your post cards VIA text & imgur to any phone number supported by Twilo's SMS service.

How we built it

We built it using a tech stack of react and flask. We coded a RESTful Flask API for the back-end, and a smooth react front end. The two programs communicate to each other by sending POST/GET requests.

Challenges we ran into

React can be a nightmare when it doesn't want to cooperate. Almost all of the issues we faced were with the front-end, whether it be rendering the HTML post card into a picture or neatly showing all the post cards in the home page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very happy with our seamless integration with the various Google APIs. Working with Google's NLP library was honestly awesome and many of our members plan on using it with our future personal projects.

We're also very proud of our use of Git and effective communication between the team. It was our first Hackathon, and after this, it most certainly won't be the last.

What we learned

We knew nothing about the Google Cloud APIs before starting Carter, and after working closely with them so much, it opened our eyes up to cloud and server less computing.

What's next for Carter

Some of our members will work on the project within their free time in hope to turn the program into a fully-fledged web app with hopes to make it publicly available.