Cuddles

Landing

Inspiration

The animal kingdom is a real wonder. Brainstorming ideas for WildHacks II, I noticed a very real gap in the lack of animal and pets specific communities. I realized there are scattered Facebook and WhatsApp groups, but they lack the reach.

Cuddles is an online community platform designed to solve this problem. Maybe you have a found a dog who desperately needs a home, or your cat is acting very weird for the past few days. The quickest way to get help is to post in the online Cuddles community, where you will only find animal lovers to come to your aid. Cuddles also has a 'Wall of Cuddles' where people can share their joy of animals with others.

What it does

So you have decided to join the Cuddles community. You will be able to authenticate yourself securely using your Gmail account and enter the website. You will be greeted with the 'Wall of Cuddles' page where you will be able to see others posts, and also post yourself. Need some help or have some questions regarding animals? Head over to the 'Ask for help' tab. Fill out the details and voilà! you have your question ready to be answered by the community. Head over to the 'Provide Help' page to see all queries posted and organized neatly, with the feature to sort too. You open any query to find yourself in a new page, where you can comment and even send an email to the person who posted the query. Emails are limited to only one per post per user to prevent spamming.

How we built it

The ideation was based on a lot of research and conversations with friends to find a real problem which could be solved in this hackathon.

The whole project is built using the MERN stack.
I used Tailwind CSS for styling of the website.
Secure authentication is done using Auth0.
Images are stored in firebase storage.
Email functionality is implemented using Twilio.

Challenges we ran into

Ideation took more time than expected, and designing the UI of the website was difficult as I was not much experienced in Tailwind CSS although I am decent in CSS.
I had never used Auth0, Firebase storage or Twilio before. Integrating all three of them on the website was quite difficult. Firebase updated version had very less tutorials available on YouTube and Google and so I struggled a lot to implement file storage.
Innumerable bugs and stupid mistakes like missing semi-colons was very irritating.
The sheer pressure of time to build a big website, and working alone resulted in a lack of sleep :P

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was able to identify an actual problem and bring it to life within the time limit of this hackathon.
I was able to develop a fairly good looking UI using Tailwind CSS
Storing of images in Firebase was a really big achievement for me. It took me a lot of time to go through the documentation and implement the feature successfully.
I am really proud of how I implemented Auth0 to control the Authentication flow and Twilio to send Emails.
Really proud of how much I learnt in my first hackathon.