Eventos

Inspiration

Being a group of minorities the google challenge was the one that stood the most for us. Trying to implement technology into a way to add value for personal growth was our motivation for working on this project.

What it does

Our application is a platform for social events sharing. Each user is able to create an account and create their own events. This events are used in a way to encourage users to expose themselves to different cultures while keeping everything in their language of preference. How it works is that after a user creates an event, this one becomes public for all the other users to see. If choosing to do so, the user can change their language of preference in the settings which results in all the listings updating to the preferred language. This not only increases the user experience by keeping it native to your mother tongue, but if chosen you can also start getting familiarized with a different language.

How we built it

We used Android Studio for building the native android app, 8Base for the backend, Google Cloud Platform for the translate services, Kotlin for the main programming language, About 10 cans of redbull and 5 cups of cafesitos, and last but not least, a lot of snacks.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge in this hack, was working with 8Base. Since we decided to build a Native Android application, we had to play around with different libraries in order to be able to interact with the 8Base Platform. This turned out in a love/hate relationship with the product. This one provides with an easy to use, single endpoint, API that facilitates the lives of software developers. Unfortunately, currently only React support is documented in the website and they haven't released an Android SDK, only iOS. This provided with many challenges, that in a different platform, would have been an easy implementation, couple of them being: running apollo-cli to get the schema.json; Mapping queries values such as Date to Date in Kotlin (for whatever reason, it just wasn't working) and probably the most frustrating, trying to implement Files in an mutation to upload from the mobile device (we were unable to accomplish this goal).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our proudest accomplishment is having being able to get the basic functionalities of 8Base into our application. The fact that we didn't have an SDK to work with and still were able to connect 8Base for our database is, in our opinion, an impressive achievement and something to be proud of.

What we learned

We learned that working with software that are still in beta with little to no communication is not an easy task. But even though it provided with a lot of challenges, there is a lot of potential in this platform and we can't wait to work with it again once it reaches a more stable level.