Half Way Up

Inspiration

There are a variety of other sites that individuals can use to network with one another and share ideas. Large businesses can collab amongst themselves to get ideas flowing and implemented. Start-ups, on the other hand, are left in the dark. Thus, we wanted to develop a forum-style networking website that gives start-ups a space to share ideas and build open them. It can also help promote product collaboration between startups.

What it does

Using this website, startup companies will have their own forums for discussion and connection. We envision a startup having the ability to create an account to immediately start troubleshooting with fellow startups, advertise their brand to students and interested hobbyists, and engage in business transactions directly, circumventing the middleman.

How we built it

We developed the client end using react.js as a template for dynamically rendering content onto our website. On the server end, we developed a flask application to manage account registration, login/out session managing, user and company profile information, and forum management (adding, editing, and deleting forum posts and comments)

Challenges we ran into

One big challenge that we ran into was successfully incorporating the elements of react.js in our design. Only one person on our team had experience with react.js, so it was something new and challenging for all of us. However, in the end, we persevered.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One accomplishment that we are proud of is successfully incorporating someone outside of the Computer Science field into our team. Ryan is a Mechanical Engineering student at RPI who has an interest in computer science. Throughout the event, we taught him various skills and exposed him to various tools. A couple hours in, he was helping us with the react.js code for our project. Another accomplishment we are proud of is successfully dividing up tasks and merging our code together for production.

What we learned

Everyone learned something new about react.js during the hackathon. We also learned about a tool called https://hoppscotch.io/ from the SNYK event, which helped us to debug our server end while our client end was still in development.

What's next for Half Way Up

We want to deploy our concept to the real world. We think we have a solid idea, exploring something that has not been delved into before. One of our team members will help to migrate our flask server in Heroku over to AWS, allowing us to have more consistent response times and coverage. In addition, we will work on adding features like following other users, personalized post feeds, and direct messaging between users.