Girls Gone Running

Form a community of female runners who can run together in order to both cultivate community and keep each other safe in public spaces.

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Inspiration

Fitness is a topic that is very good at building community and fostering strong connections, and going on runs and walks is one avenue of this! Going on runs and walks around the community or at a nearby park is a one avenue of fitness, but women may feel unsafe doing so in public spaces or may even simply just want a friend. Overall, the inspiration behind this project is a combination of fostering community, addressing safety concerns, promoting social interaction, and utilizing technology to facilitate connections and support among female runners.

What it does

This application has a database of users with statistics for each user with data such as average run time, average speed, common route locations, and common run times. Each user can then see a list of users with similar habits that they can chat with to coordinate runs or walks to go on together.

How I built it

We set up a server on MongoDB to store the users. We then used Express and React.js to build our Program. We also used Strava API, a running app where a user can track their running data, in order for users to be able to upload their own data from their tracking.

Challenges I ran into

There were many issues using the Strava API because we had trouble authenticating. There were also issues we had connecting the front end and back end, particularly with trying to get the data from Strava or Mongo to propagate into the front end.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to connect to a server and did end up figuring out the authentication to get user data from Strava. Overall, for a team of two, we accomplished quite a lot for a project that was quite ambitious.

What I learned

We learned a lot about MongoDB database connections, Express.js, React.js, and primarily API endpoint calls.

What's next for Girls Gone Running

We had an idea where a user would be able to notify nearby runners when they go on their runs, which would be a good feature. There should also be a chat feature so that the runners who are matched should be able to match with each other.

There lots of potential to create a better matching system between users and their activity statistics, possibly using machine learning KNN algorithms. Furthermore, Strava API connections can be to streamline user registration and login processes.

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