Inspiration
Communication during trips with your friend group or family are always a hassle. This is what inspired us to create an app that makes social travel easier for all travellers.
What it does
Grouptravel, provides all travellers with a dashboard for their trip, including shared events, splittable bills and relevant documents into one place specifically designed for travel.
How we built it
We split tasks into UX, Front-End and Back-End. We started out with the back-end, which was build with FastAPI, and the UX, for which we used wrote design documents and created mockups. Once the first iteration of the UX was done, we created the front end with React Native and Expo. The entirety of the codebase was generated by GPT 5.6.
Challenges we ran into
Project Scope
We started out with a complete vision of the final product and then scoped it down. Even though we scoped it down, it was not enough. Due to the new tools we thought that we could handle the scope, but as explained in the second challenge, our workflow wasn't thought out enough to harness the tools properly.
Coding agents in a team of software developers
The software development tasks were split into front-end and back-end. While we had one developer for the backend, we had two devs for the front-end. We worked very iteratively with the coding agent taking care of the whole codebase. Though this improved the speed at which one developer could code it made it hard to keep up the current state of the project and stay focused on what is really important to the app. This "break things fast" mentality did not work for us in this case as sharing a task get's very hard when bugs are scattered throughout the entire app and not only a section where one person is responsible for.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of being able to ideate, prototype and ship an entire projects in 2 work days.
What we learned
Expo and React Native for seamless multiplatform development
This was the first time we worked with the framework and we are very pleased with the ease of the development platform. It allowed us to test and ship the software in a speed we weren't expecting.
Creating a multi-user system
This was the first time for us creating a multi-user system that allows users to share a link and invite other people to one and the same project.
Backend hosting
There are free and very cost effective ways to host your backend. Options that we previously weren't aware of.
Seperation of Concerns in a Team
With the increase in the speed of software development the separation of concerns in a team becomes even more important. If the boundaries of responsibilities aren't clear enough it will hurt the productivity of your entire team.
What's next for Grouptravel
As a next step we want to bring the prototype to the Play Store, App Store and publish it as a web app. On the product side we want to improve the file handling on the backend, so that the file service works reliably.
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