ecothon.

Helping communities fight for the environment.

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Inspiration

As students passionate about causes such as the environment and raising awareness for increasingly dangerous threats like climate change, we used our technical abilities in order to facilitate this! We wanted to build a platform to spread awareness and allow people to share information and tips on how to be as eco conscious as possible.

What it does

It gives people the chance to take part in eco-related achievements and share these with people around them, and get points for being an eco warrior! You can follow others and keep track of leaderboards in order to see who of your friends is doing the most to save the planet. When you check off an achievement, you can share pictures and details about your experiences and help others learn! The app also gives tips and tricks, and facts about how bad some seemingly innocent practices can be for the environment - from new technology to the soap you wash your hands with.

How we built it

We have a cross-platform mobile app built using the Flutter framework; data is fetched from the backend server running on DigitalOcean (using Kubernetes and Docker to containerize the application!). Our backend is a Golang application with use of the Fiber framework for creating the REST framework and interfacing with our MongoDB cluster.

Challenges we ran into

Everyone in the team had to learn new skills so plenty of StackOverflow crawling was required in order to get everything working. We also struggled for hours with one particular problem involving pre-signed image URL uploads to DigitalOcean S3.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Each of us are, obviously, proud of the work we have done, and how we have worked together in order to get as much done as possible. In particular, the CI Kubernetes cluster was a glorious moment for our team - as George no longer had to push the Docker image manually.

What we learned

Each of us has learned new programming languages, frameworks, and techniques! Particularly Golang and the Fiber framework. We've also learned the importance of energy drinks :)

What's next for ecothon.

In the future, we'd like to see more possibilities for the types of achievements people can complete and the types of content people can share (videos, links to blogs, etc). We hope to continue serving it so we can reach out to more people, keep expanding it, and sharing the importance of our message.

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