charityQ

Inspiration

Our inspiration was out personal experiences with the freeze that Texas experienced. Living in Dallas we saw our community go without water and power. We ourselves and our friends made posts advertising free bottled water and blankets but our posts didn't seem to reach those in need. There has to be a better way to connect communities so they can help each other outside of social media

What it does

Our web app allows users to make accounts and log in. Once logged in they can decide to request items or to donate items. If a user decides to request items they will select from some categories that we have and then the ones that they are selected for they will be added to a queue for that type of item. The user who decides to donate will be matched with the user that is at the top of the queue for the item they want to donate. After this they will get emails informing them that they were matched up and they can plan on how they will process the exchange.

How we built it

We used the MEAN stack and JWT for authentication

Challenges we ran into

The authentication took us a long time to figure out and trouble shoot. We also had CORS errors that took us a while to crack

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Neither of us had used express js or node js yet we were able to create something that could genuinely help people. We also had never used authentication in our web apps so this felt like we were taking it up a notch

What we learned

We learned how to use mongo DB, express, node, what CORS is, and authentication with JWT

What's next for charityQ

The next steps would be to polish up the web app. It could use work like matching users by distance or other metrics. We also want to add ways to protect the system from people who aren't acting in good faith. The front end could use some polishing and the email functionality is in the back end but was not implemented in the front end

Built With

• angular.js
• express.js
• github
• jwt
• mongodb
• node.js
• postman