Current | Current Courses

A growth application focused on external & internal sustainability.

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Current 🌊 🏃🐠 🐚

Your mood. Your state. Your next course.

🌊 Inspiration

As a Computer Science major and Psychology minor interested in human-computer interaction, I’m interested in how technology can support both people and the environments around them.

I was already thinking about growth and sustainability from both a CS and psychology perspective, but ShellHacks connected those ideas in ways I wasn’t expecting. At the opening, hearing from Waymo about designing around human tiredness and Sperry Tech about environmental sustainability really stuck with me. INIT’s work around bringing networks down, along with conversations throughout the hackathon, helped connect those ideas even further.

Which became Current | Current Courses.

Current represents where you are right now, as well as the current of waves that inspired the coastal theme. Courses represents direction, change, and courses of action.

The name Born Again Shell is a play on Bash’s “Bourne Again Shell,” while also reflecting growth and becoming something new.

🏃 What it does

Current | Current Courses is a human-centered growth and sustainability experience that helps users explore options, understand tradeoffs, and choose their own course.

The core experience follows:

Current State, Courses, Tradeoffs, Compare, Choose

A user starts by describing their current state and what matters to them, such as:

  • Energy and wellbeing
  • Time
  • Transportation and distance
  • Congestion
  • Environmental impact
  • Personal preferences

Current then presents possible courses of action and helps the user explore how those options differ.

Users can compare tradeoffs across options, understand how each course fits their current situation, and ultimately choose what works for them.

Rather than deciding what is “best,” Current makes the tradeoffs visible and leaves the decision with the person.

🐠 How we built it

Built as a solo project during ShellHacks under Born Again Shell, using:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • GitHub
  • Cloudflare Pages
  • Cloudflare DNS
  • Porkbun

The core product components are:

  • Current State: captures where the user is and what matters right now.
  • Courses of Action: organizes possible options based on that context.
  • Tradeoff View: surfaces differences such as time, distance, congestion, environmental impact, and personal fit.
  • Explore & Compare: lets users consider multiple courses instead of receiving one prescribed answer.
  • Choose Your Course: keeps the final decision with the user.

My background in CS and Psychology, interest in HCI, and previous experience leading a software engineering team and serving as frontend and integration engineer on a capstone shaped the project’s human-centered direction.

I also took the project from a local HTML/CSS/JS prototype to a live website at current.courses with HTTPS.

For future iterations, I proposed MongoDB for integrated data, Gemini for summarizing available courses, and ElevenLabs for a more integrated voice and interaction experience. I also explored expanding the experience around internal sustainability characteristics alongside external factors such as congestion, crime rates, and other community conditions, with the potential to eventually connect people with opportunities to invest directly in communities.

🐚 Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was scope. I wanted the experience to be meaningful without deciding the entire solution before actually experiencing the hackathon.

Working solo also meant balancing ideation, design, development, and learning new deployment concepts while navigating my first hackathon.

I kept coming back to:

What is the smallest meaningful version of this?

That meant prioritizing the core interaction over building every possible feature.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

I’m proud of turning a broad idea around growth and sustainability into a working project while building solo.

I’m especially proud that personal sustainability became part of the product itself.

Instead of:

“Here is the best choice.”

Current asks:

“Here are some options. Here’s how they differ. You decide.”

I’m also proud of taking the project from a local HTML/CSS/JS prototype to a live website with its own domain and HTTPS.

🧭 What we learned

I learned that a hackathon is also about discovering the problem, not just building the solution.

The speakers, people I met, and experience of actually participating in ShellHacks changed how I thought about Current and helped me see connections between technology, people, environments, and change that I hadn’t fully articulated before.

I also learned that building a project is a process of discovering what the project actually is. Sometimes progress means figuring out what doesn’t need to be built yet.

🌱 What's next for Current | Current Course

Continue developing the core experience around growth, change, and sustainable courses of action.

Future directions include:

  • Richer transportation and environmental data
  • Accessibility-aware options
  • Transparent personalization
  • Voice interaction
  • Broader everyday decision-making scenarios
  • Community and place-based information

The larger question remains:

How can technology help people understand complicated choices without taking those choices away from them?

For now, Current is intentionally still moving. 🌊

Built With

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • GitHub
  • Cloudflare Pages
  • Cloudflare DNS
  • Porkbun

Find it & Try It Out

Born Again Shell

Born Again Shell is my solo team name for ShellHacks 2026.

The name is inspired by ShellHacks, growth and transformation through “born again,” the South Florida wave current, and a nod to the terminal shell!

Built solo for ShellHacks 2026.

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