Found It! @Illinois

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Inspiration

Struggling to find an idea for the Hackathon on Friday, Anish realized he absentmindedly left his jacket somewhere. We retraced our steps and found it after half an hour of searching, but then an idea dawned on us. What if we could make searching for lost items one step easier?

What it does

Found It! is a web app for Illinois students to search for their missing things on a platform which filters items by there location and the type of item specified. Additionally, it relies on good Samaritans to post missing items when they spot them.

How we built it

We started by learning how a web application and user interfaces with ReactJS works and how it is structured through learning from online articles and YouTube videos. Then, starting small at first, we built a barebones, functioning user interface, progressively styling and adding additional features. After creating a pleasing, functioning front end, we initialized a database, Google Firebase, within our web application and connected its data-related functions to the database to effectively manipulate the collected data. We used the backend to store several documents which were each comprised of individual posts' images, item types, item locations, and additional comments. As Google Firebase is a NoSQL database, it does not utilize traditional SQL commands and so to leverage the data, we had to come up with several different ways. Some that worked and some that didn't. After the connection was established and we implemented all the data manipulation methods we needed, we had several bugs that we had to debug and after working those out we had to optimize our code, thus giving us the finished product: Found It! (Shoutout Rob for being a great mentor and guiding us in the right direction).

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges along the way. We started with VueJS as our initial framework, but found it difficult to connect it with the backend. After spending all day learning React, we were able to get a solid front-end, but ended up losing it all due to git hub pushing errors. Even though this was a major hurdle, we didn't give up and used our learning to redevelop the User Interface even quicker. Learning the backend was new to all our members and took us the longest time understanding the syntax and functions involved.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of what we were able to make as it was all of our team members first time working on a full stack project. We are very happy with our user-friendly interface and design because of how simplistic it is while being very effective in its overall performance. Additionally, all of our team members are proud of how much we were able to learn in just the time span of 36 hours.

What we learned

The first things we learned from developing this web application were how a web application is structured and how the individual components interact with one another. We also learned how data manipulation and databases work. Beyond that, as we progressed further into the development process, we learned how the front-end interacts with the back-end and how to make it all come together to form a complete, functional web application.

What's next for Found It! @Illinois

There are many details we wanted to implement but did not have the time to. These include replying and other users' responses to the posts that are made. Also, implementing authentication within our web application can make it more secure and avoid invalid posts and other security breaches.