Inspiration
When we moved to college, we realized how difficult it was to earn money and experience without dedicating a large portion of our schedules that we didn't have. We designed HustleBoard under Track 1 as a manifestation of the website we wish existed. The goal of HustleBoard is to focus on self-potential and reliable freelancing or side hustles.
What it does
HustleBoard is a system that allows people to quickly find hustles they will actually enjoy, while tracking earnings, hours worked, etc. in a centrally managed system. This way, people know exactly what they are getting into, and can analyze their performance nicely. Throughout the app, there are various integrations to make other parts of the user's life easier too, such as advice on what to do with the money earned from hustling.
How we built it
We built the app primarily through NextJS and Express. To store data, we opted to use a JSON solution, to make this app easy to host and fast, however we made sure that our implementation can be hot swapped out with something more scalable, like Mongoose. Throughout our source code, there are test scripts that are run in a typical node environment, to ensure that any changes we make to the source code doesn't mess up other parts of our app.
Challenges we ran into
We faced several challenges when creating our app. Firstly, we had several performance issues with NextJS, and to fix this, we segmented off UI chunks to load in a smooth fashion. Data storage was also a huge issue, and to handle this, we wrote a custom JSON handler that hashes data quickly, taking learnings from our computer science classes to the real world. Understanding how to make a good UI was also a huge challenge: we brute forced alot of CSS/JSX combinations before we ended up on the UI we liked.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we learned alot about app design. In particular, Aaron learned alot about UI elements, whereas Sidharth learned the intricacies of backend work, such as data storage, process handling, and Docker setups. We believe that the app we created is scalable and really easy to build off of, which isn't common in such a short timeframe as people tend to hardcode, and make bad design choices when time gets low. We managed time well, and this skillset can easily be transferred to many things.
What we learned
We are brand new to coding and learned much of how to form this project through research and practice. From web development to hashing and JavaScript, to presentation design and Full-stack Development, we learned quite a bit about how a project is put together and how everything works as a system to make a product.
What's next for HustleBoard
We have rough skeletons complete for a social network aspect to Hustleboard, where users can compare their data with others, and chat to form connections. We believe this would be the most obvious next step, and it would make our app significantly more useful. We also would love to implement more on the side of the people who need a helping hand, such as a separate UI for analyzing results when hiring different people through HustleBoard.
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