Inspiration
During the pandemic, we found that people often felt discouraged to exercise. Mental and Physical well-being skyrocketed to levels unseen before, with social interaction unable to take place and fear spreading of the virus. We also noticed that some people were unsure where to start, how to do so properly, and what resources to utilize. Thus, we felt we needed to address this issue and inspire everyone to bring back mental & physical well-being into their lives.
What it does
When we were brainstorming our project idea, we knew we wanted our application to be user oriented. Our website application FitFinder takes user data points and uses an algorithm to put together a set of exercises that would best fit the user. The user can then choose to save their information by making an account or temporarily have their routine available.
How we built it
Since we were building a full-stack website application, we separated our development process into two stages: front-end and back-end. For the front-end we decided to use HTML/CSS and ReactJS to render our website accordingly. For the back-end we decided to use NodeJS/ExpressJS to create a REST API and Firebase to store our data components safely in Cloud Firestore.
Challenges we ran into
This project was challenging in the sense of time and skills. We came into this project with basically zero experience building full-stack website applications. We had to learn how to use frameworks, dive right into documentation that were often many pages in length, and somehow work together to get our stack talking to each other. Since we all had different skill sets, we ran into many issues getting our REST API to receive and parse requests properly, our front-end markup rendering properly, our Firebase DB authenticated, and much more! Luckily we all had the patience and drive to carefully assess each individual situation and act accordingly, leading to a successful end result.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are honestly proud of learning so much in a single day and managing to put together our components that would have led to a successful end result. We believe with a bit more time we could have integrated our application together, but we are happy of what we accomplished!
What we learned
We learned many things: working in a team, learning a complex technology stack, working with industry developer tools, etc. Working with each other was tough, as we had different ways of describing our technical issues and had to work with some sort of standard. Learning React and Node/Express was completely new, but we were glad we got our hands dirty working with these wonderful frameworks. Lastly, thanks to GCP credits we had access to industry tools like Firebase, allowing us to gain valuable experience working with the platform and building something amazing out of that!
What's next for FitFinder
We hope to extend to mobile, to allow ease of access to a majority of users. We also plan to add some more complexity, possibly a maps feature to identify nearby resources to utilize, and greater visual components!
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