HoosTerrapin

Inspiration

One of our group members has ADHD and this web app was built to help her and others like her overcome that difficulty focusing.

What it does

We hope to do what to studying what Venmo did to payments between friends. We've gamified and made the experience of doing work into a social event. You and your friends log in to your account from anywhere and can keep tabs on each other's progress as you complete tasks to keep each other motivated. It tracks your work and automatically updates your progress bar and social leaderboard - as well as a personal calendar to stay on task.

How we built it

We built this from the ground up using CockroachDB. Cockroach served as the database for all things HoosTerrapin - user data, tasks, friend relationships, everything we do with data is hosted on their (lack of) servers. This allows us to have data persistence and a highly survivable back-end. We used Django to implement our back end logic and controllers, implementing an MVC design. This allowed us to use the familiar flexibility of python in a web development application. We intentionally loosely coupled these pieces together to allow for growth and modularity. Finally, our front end was composed of Bootstrap on top of HTML and CSS. This allowed us to design an interactive and responsive user interface.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had used CockroachDB or Django before this project. This was a major learning curve, but there was no time to do anything but hit the ground running. We were forced to adapt and pick it up quick. We learned a lot in the process. This presented a number of unforeseen challenges that pushed us to improve.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the consistent design across the site, use of CockroachDB for all of our data, and generally the way we adapted to new languages and applications. Additionally, we really put effort into having full working features and not just mock-ups.

What we learned

So much.

What's next for HoosTerrapin

We hope to add a mobile version and chrome extension. We'll be setting this up with AWS to deploy the site in the coming week. We feel this can help lots of people and are excited to see what else we can do.