Inspiration
We came up with the idea for Confided based on the prevalence of mental illness today, especially in young adults and teens. We wanted to consider those who do not feel comfortable exposing their thoughts and concerns to their friends and family. If they had the ability to remain anonymous, speaking to someone who understands their struggles and is willing to talk them through healing, we feel as though these people will be given the opportunity they need to improve themselves in a healthy manner.
What it does
Confided matches users who are in need of help/reassurance with users who are willing to provide just that. After pairing the two, one of the users can click on a match and begin talking to someone through a series of text messages. Users can pick up where they left off or they can match with someone else. There, users can chat about their mental state, things going on in their life, or general stresses, thus allowing those in need an outlet to release their emotions. Confided allows consumers to chose their username so that they may remain completely anonymous if they desire.
How we built it
We employed a variety of tools while creating Confided. A few of us took to front-end development, working mostly with react-native and expo to run our application and get a quick visualization of what we had done. The others utilized mongodb and mongoose to create a database that would store all of the user's information. Those that worked on the back-end also utilized the Express API to bridge the divide between mongoose/mongodb and react-native.
Challenges we ran into
For many of us, this project was unlike any that we had worked on before. This meant that there was a huge learning curve when it came to the variety of platforms and languages and libraries we used to create the app. Once we all began to get used to how these tools worked, we soon realized it would be difficult to connect the front and back ends together to make the app fully functioning. We also did not anticipate having to utilize Express until after we had already begun, which meant for a lot of backtracking on our part. Finally, we were forced to consider the fact that there was far too much we wanted to accomplish and far too little time. This left us to decide what the most important parts of the app were and what could be saved for a later time: a difficult decision to say the least.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The way that this app has come together has made us all extremely proud. Despite our difficulty combining the front and back ends of the projects, as well as the merge errors we encountered, we put in all of our effort into joining the two forces and creating something amazing. We are especially proud of how all of us worked restlessly throughout the night to make the app the best it could be. No matter how late it got or how tired we became, if one of us had an idea we put our heads together to make it happen.
What we learned
Like we said, this project was very new for many of our group members. We did a lot of research to figure out how to use react-native, we expanded our knowledge of database structure, and we dived deeper into GitHub than ever before. One of the most important things we learned, however, was how to work together as a team. While we have all known each other for a little bit of time now, we had never worked together as a group, especially not in conditions like these. Despite how tired or overwhelmed we felt, we managed to rally behind each other and give each other as much aid as possible, which we think is what made this experience so successful.
What's next for Confided
Following SwampHacks, we plan to clean up and implement all of the things we were unable to do during the confines of the competition. For example, we hope to add a chatbot feature to monitor conversations between users to ensure that there is no malintent from either party. This bot would look for words commonly used in harmful language and ban these users from the app. On the same thread, we would like to look into creating a verification process for the users to provide further safety for our users. We also wish to expand on our current pairing algorithm to match users based on shared traits (personality, past experiences, etc.) as opposed to the random matching we have currently.
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