Cheer My Friend

Marathons are tough. You are running long time around strangers. Getting personal messages from friends helps.

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Inspiration

One of our team members is really keen on running marathons. From his experience we have learned that keeping the spirit high is really important for good marathon performance. Unfortunately it is easy to lose focus in that sea of people when you are running a marathon. Hearing your friends or loved ones voice every now and then will help you to focus and keep your spirit high.

What it does

Our application is a simple way to cheer for a friend that is participating in a marathon. The runner who wants to get some cheers, downloads the application and shares a personal link to their friends. With the link, runner’s friends can send short recordings to the the runner, and the runner will hear the recordings through their headphones. The friends of the runner don’t have to install any app, since the recording runs on a web browser.

Application can of course be used in other endurance tests than marathons.

How we built it

We started the work by choosing the technologies and dividing the tasks between us and got to work. It was kinda a weird mix of waterfall and agile software development models. Everybody had one field as their responsibility, and when they got their tasks done, they helped the others.

For the mobile app we chose React Native to be able to create iOS and Android versions easily. In backend we have Rails server with Postgres. Due to problems with React, we created the cheerers’ frontend with good ol’ jQuery and some bubblegum code. Login to the app is made with Facebook.

The product is fully functional: runner can login to the app and get a personalised link top share; runners’ friends can send recordings from website, and the runner’s app will automatically play them.

We also built a website for our app: www.cheerfriend.com

Challenges we ran into

We had an ambitious plan to design and develop a complete app during 20 hour hackathon. Throughout the event we had problems with internet connection and it cut heavily into our development time, especially when starting the development. We also had some problems with the chosen technologies, as things didn’t go as planned with AWS Elastic Beanstalk and React Native.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We designed and created awesome application with great market potential. Using technology to create wholesome digital experiences is our mission and this application is great example of that. The app utilizes technology to create way for personal support in a way that wasn't possible earlier.

What we learned

One very interesting thing was squeezing the pitch into one minute. We definitely learned a lot about summarizing and focusing on the key values.

Our developers also learned much about the used technologies.

What's next for Cheer My Friend

Our plan is to polish the application and launch it on iOS and Android in the near future. We are also thinking of a smart watch version of the app.

Demo

Ask our team to get a demo! You recognize us from the Perfektio hoodies.

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