HelpMeow

Inspiration

New York City is home to a massive but largely hidden population of stray and feral cats. Estimates suggest there are around 500,000 community cats living across the five boroughs. Many of these are not socialized ("feral"), while others are lost or abandoned pets ("stray") trying to survive on the city streets. Feral and stray cats often live precarious lives - exposed to disease, malnutrition, traffic, and other urban hazards.

What it does

Our app, HelpMeow, provides a community-centered platform to help tackle the stray/feral cat problem in NYC more effectively. We provide a more direct and seemless way for shelters/volunteers to respond to a call of a kitty in need.

How we built it

UI/UX were prototyped in Figma. AI Integration with Gemini API to create an auto-generated "Cat Case File". Node.js and JavaScript for the backend. npm to manage our dependencies, libraries, and build tools (react-leaflet for map).

Challenges we ran into

Implementation of our "Transfer the task system" where we aimed at creating a smooth transfer of responsibilities from user reporting the stray cat to the animal shelters. Creating our geolocation map was also a challenge as we were unfamiliar with setting up our environment, but we found alternatives.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our geolocation map took the longest and was the most rewarding and finding the aesthetic of our app

What we learned

As first time hackers, we learned to rapidly develop our product by paying attention to react syntax's, information architecture, and creating a git repository for our product for version control