Hermes

Hermes
Hermes
Hermes

Inspiration

While looking through various groupMe and Facebook groups, I discovered a significant amount of people looking for carpool’s home during the weekends and before breaks. I saw a major flaw with this system. Not only was it inconvenient and difficult to find rides through group chats that have hundreds of messages added every day, but there was a lack of safety that was concerning. This inspired our group to create a solution that integrates a variety of features that will give college students a better, easier, and safer experience.

How we Built out Project

We began to build Hermes using various resources but mainly Firebase and FlutterFlow were used. Firebase is a google product that performs as an app development service. The uniqueness compared to other, more traditional forms of app development of Firebase stems from the fact it allows developers to focus entirely on the app environment itself; essentially, eliminating the use of backend software engineers as a vital necessity for an app to be created. Therefore, we concluded that using Firebase will make our ride sharing app Hermes much easier to develop as we were more focused on the app’s features. Another resource used heavily by our team was Flutter and Canva. Our graphics for the app were designed using the platform Canva, a free to use graphic design service. Flutter is another Google product that makes app development much easier. It contains its own programming language called Dart which makes compilation of the source code much faster, making it an extremely competitive software development kit that ties in with Flutter. It also contains many packages that can be added as well as a great user friendly IDE. The main features of Flutter we used were its widgets. We learned how versatile the widgets of Flutter can be, and they serve as the backbone in our app’s features.

Challenges and Issues

The biggest issues we came to during our project would be understanding Firebase and Flutter. Both google products were at first difficult to understand, especially its bugs, as they had us confused and annoyed at first. However, with google searches and youtube tutorials, it eventually became a natural impediment to our development that we no longer stressed heavily about. Collaboration as a whole during the development of Hermes was always a small issue. The major flaw of Flutter for us was only allowing one member on the application at a time to edit the app, so we couldn't collaborate as much as we wanted to. We made do with this fact, but that drawback made the development of Hermes much slower than we anticipated, eventually impacting us in the end with the short amount of time left in the hackathon.