Inspiration?
We entered this hackathon for developing our skills and with a mindset to learn something new and interesting. We wanted to create something that had market value and was helpful to people, but then it hit us.
The best way to help people is to give them access to knowledge and education, and what better to offer than a vast array of books! 😀
And so, we decided to create an online platform service that sells books.
But what does it do?
This is a platform that offers a variety of books for sale and is solely dedicated to the book lovers out there. It does so with a great UI and an easily navigable setting so that people get what they came looking for.
And you built it with?
We wanted our project to be an online delivery platform, thus we wanted it to be as convenient and easily navigable as possible. We all had heard about the MERN stack and how it is a very convenient source for creating projects, thus we created the frontend using React.js with the help of HTML, CSS, and backend APIs using Node.js, Express, Javascript with Mongodb as Database.
Challenges, challenges 🌶
Our team was comprised of people who were confident about various different skills and languages, but the one thing we all had in common was that we hadn't touched the MERN stack ever before. Thus, we had many challenges solving the issues while creating the project, but we learnt as we moved forward and by scratching our heads over it together, we managed to create something worth mentioning. 🤼 This being our first hackathon, we ran short on our time management skills. We never anticipated the challenges we would face - managing time, errors we ran into, bugs and shortcomings in the UI. In a single plate, accumulating all of this and collaborating together was fun, albeit new to us. Shoutout to our parents who understood what a virtual hackathon is and how we actually require complete 24 hours of the clock to work on stuff! 😂
So that's what we achieved.
We created many functionalities in this project for user convenience and user data security despite having little knowledge about the stack, but we learnt and overcame all the errors. Once we got to the authentication part and witnessed our CRUD app protected with authentication, we were flushed with a sense of satisfaction because whatever progress we did, we saw it being paid off.
And here's what we learned.
We learned so much in the Web-dev domain, solved many issues, and grew together. This was our first time collaborating on a single project, that too limited with time. Our time management skills were tested to the limit. Since this was a virtual event, we had to juggle between our time on-screen and otherwise. We weren't familiar with the MERN stack but after working on this project together, we are motivated to pursue learning this stack and are eager to build more projects based on it.
What's next for CoverPage?
We will try to develop this skeletal frontend even further and integrate it with the backend, which can be perfected even more. And deploy it real-time. No project is ever complete. Features can be added on and on and on. That's what we plan for CoverPage. And, who knows, if things end well, this might start into a great venture 🤔
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