helpify

Inspiration

We noticed that many people COVID-19 face many difficulties due to personal accessibility needs. In order to ensure that everyone is taken care of during these harsh times, we designed a web application that will connect volunteers to people who need help

What it does

This web application will allow users like old people who are less prone to the virus and aren't able to go out and obtain essentials from the grocery stores.

How we built it

We used Firebase for auth, a database(Firestore), storage! We used react as the frontend for managing client interactions, with the google maps API for a bunch of services as well.

Challenges we ran into

Converting from realtime database to cloud firestore was the first major issue we had. Unfortunately the boilerplate we started off with was based off of a realtime database tutorial. Realtime databases were often used for applications that required real time interaction such as messenger apps, helpify clearly wasn't. Hence it took quite a while to get the conversion done.

Second major issue was remote development. When starting we thought having a virtual hackathon meant productivity would be better than a physical one, as we had the comforts of our home and bed. However, collaborating remotely was harder than we thought as it lead to issues such as misunderstandings about certain features, miscommunications related to workload distribution and accountability for different parts of the application.