CommArt

A personalized web application where users can order commissions from artists that create physical/digital media.

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Inspiration

Due to the ongoing pandemic, it has been rough for artists to make a living. I wanted to create a simple web application that could allow a user to order a commission from an artist easily. While platforms like Twitter allow artists to display their work in a public manner, Twitter isn't specialized in appealing to every aspect of the digital art market.

What it does

It lists artists and you can pick one of the artists to order a commission from. You select a type of project from the dropdown menu and then the price gets adjusted to what you selected. Actually saving the order and nodemailer were not implemented as planned.

How I built it

I used React.js to build the front end. The icons were downloaded from React libraries.

Challenges I ran into

I wanted to make it using MongoDB, Express.js and Node.js, but I was so busy with the front end. I have built many different front end components, but not completely on my own. I definitely had trouble making a side navigation menu. I had trouble remembering syntax and simple data passing. It came to a point where I got so frustrated with how "props" worked that when I used Link to create a path, I used the artist's name to append with the pathname, I instantiated a string that contained only the path and not the origin, took that string and cut it so only the part containing the name was left, took THAT string and replaced the "%20" with spaces so that I can use that string as the artist's name in the component. It was a lot of unnecessary work, it's really not how it's supposed to work, but I was running out of time.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Honestly, I'm just glad I was able to make an attempt. It's not all the time I am pressured into finishing an application in a short amount of time. I was glad that I was able to still attend some Hopin sessions and get to meet new people. I also doubled my total number of connections on LinkedIn, so I'm already gaining a lot from this hackathon.

What I learned

I need to find a team. I wanted to struggle as much as I could in my first hackathon so I know what to do for next time. A team would definitely make up for a lot of my weaknesses and I think it would be a lot more fun collaborating with a group. One of the biggest challenging factors is time.

What's next for CommArt?

I plan to finish the application with all the unfinished features, in the future. I look to collaborate with others willing to work on it on the GitHub repository. It's a nice scalable project so I wouldn't let it go to waste.

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