Flake.U

Inspiration

We all have that one friend who pulls out on us at the last minute, or promises to go to a free event but is simply too --lazy-- busy to show up. This is both an inconvenience, and a massive annoyance for many of us, but it can be reduced, or even prevented, by requiring a physical commitment that they could stand to lose if they end up flaking once again.

What it does

Flake.U provides a platform for users to commit to goals and promises with cold, hard cash, therefore providing real and salient motivation to stick to their commitments, whether to friend groups, or life goals. Users can create Commitment Groups with a money pledge for either a group goal, or attendance to an event. If everyone in that group makes it for the goal, then everyone gets their money back. If even one person fails to make it, the flakers (flakey like salmon) have their pledge split up among the other members of the group. If everyone fails to make it, then the entire sum gets donated to charity! FlakeU is also a social network site, for looking at what our friends are committed to; what they've done in the past; and, of course, what they've flaked out of in the past! This additional social element helps further cut the flaking out of our social groups.

How we built it

We built the page entirely with Wix Code.

Challenges we ran into

• The coder on our team fell sick halfway through the Hackathon and had to leave Harvard for home, leaving us extremely short on coding knowledge. Everyone on the team had only slight HTML/CSS knowledge, and almost no back-end coding knowledge.
• We encountered several bugs on the Wix Code Beta platform, including a tendency to freeze whenever there were Javascript errors or upon performing some specific actions, such as Lightbox toggling. Some of these bugs and crashes resulted in us losing big chunks of work at times, especially htwhen Wix froze while or before we saved our changes.
• The rest of us did not know any Javascript beyond simple front-end design, so we tried to code the APIs and in Javascript with what we could gather from the Wix API guide and an immense amount of Googling.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Our _ beautiful_ UI, including the graphics and logo used. Wix helps speed up front-end web designing, and we were able to make our page prettier than possible with the minimal HTML/CSS knowledge that we had.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about Wix code - how to use it, as well as what it is and is not capable of. As we did not have the prior technical knowledge, we also learnt how to integrate API through Javascript into web pages.

What's next for Flake.U

With several of us in the process of taking coding lessons and access to our resident coder, we will continue development for Flake.U, to create a platform that finally cuts out the flaking from our friends =)

Built With

• wix