Holding-Hands

A safe place for everyone

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Inspiration

Losing your loved one is the most horrific and shocking thing that you can go through in your lifetime. Losing that person is not the only sad thing, another problem arises when the member that you lost was the one who you were dependent on for not only financial support but also emotional. The current Covid-19 scenario further elevated this issue.

This made us feel the need to provide a platform to help these people and also for volunteers who want to help them. It will not only be helpful today , or this month or this year , but for years to come. It will help millions of kids , parents , grandparents who are suffering from the loss of their loved ones.

What it does

Through Holding-Hands, we aim to provide a platform to provide people with a list of volunteers(registered on the platform) who can help them in various fields like finance, medicine, psychology, etc.

How we built it

We mainly built the front-end using

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript

We connected the front-end with the back-end using

  • PGSQL
  • JSON
  • Express
  • node.js
  • socket.io

Basically we used nodejs to make API which will interact with a SQL database. Those endpoints were being fetched in Vanilla Javascript. This was for registering the volunteers and client(kid, adult, seniors). We also used Webproject to make 'holding conversations'. We used SocketIO which is a framework over WebSockets and it helps using interact with websockets easily.

Challenges we ran into

First of all, one of our teammate was going through fever the whole weekend(food poisoning). That resulted in reduced efficiency of backend APIs and chat feature. We also had a problem with fetching APIs in the front-end because it's javascript. It just always gives a bunch of type errors(Just waiting when typescript will totally replace javascript in the front-end ;) ). We eventually fetched APIs which were in JSON format in React.js( a framework over Javascript).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Creating a working website in less than 48 hours with all the basic information required for the project.
  • We are proud that we could eventually fetch those APIs in JSON format

What we learned

  • Creating different types of forms using html, css and js.
  • Learning how web sockets work. We hadn't ever tried it but just had heard about it . Using it was so fun and easy.

What's next for Holding-Hands

We are really looking forward to adding authentication and maybe oauth and making the chat feature much more sophisticated by adding WebRTC, private DMs and all that stuff. I hope that our journey for this project begins at Explore Hacks :)

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