DuckTalk

Inspiration

Being an out-of-state participant of a hackathon means working in an unfamiliar city without knowing anyone. It can feel lonely or frustrating, which is why DuckTalk acts like a companion in your pocket, inspired by the concept of having a coder's duck to talk to!

What it does

DuckTalk aims to provide a virtual companion to talk to, named "Ducky." Users can keep track of their work progress by using the To Do list, use an interactive Google Map to explore the area, and stay on top of the weather around them through a 5-day weather forecast.

How we built it

I thoroughly followed the Hacker Project Guide to build the base structure and database of the website, then continued to customize it by changing CSS elements and deleting any pages or features that didn't fit the theme.

Challenges we ran into

I struggled fetching any calls with the WeatherAPI, and my register page did not properly return any input fields on the screen. It took a little debugging to understand what caused the lack of pages. I encountered an infinite loop when calling the WeatherAPI, which resulted in too many requests per minute and my API keys were temporarily locked.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First of all, I am proud to have built an entire full-stack web app in the first place. Although it was a guided project, I haven't built a functional web app with a working back-end yet, so I am proud of that. I am also proud of getting the APIs to work on my website!

What we learned

I learned so much about React and Tailwind CSS properties. The most valuable steps of the project to me were creating cards with different properties, creating different components, and creating Firebase. I've always approached databases hesitantly because I don't know how they work, but I am so proud to get it working for this project. This project allowed me to explore front-end more deeply too, and I found out that I really enjoy using Tailwind CSS!

What's next for DuckTalk

Ideally, I wanted to implement a chat box feature on the home page where you can type and "talk" to Ducky, where Ducky is actually a GPT wrapper. I would also love to make a feature where you can add and remove your own tasks in the To Do list instead of me hard coding it into the website for the sake of prototyping. The website design itself could also be refined to look cleaner!

Built With

• css
• firebase
• html
• javascript
• react
• tailwind