Jot! | Devpost

Front End Design

Inspiration

The idea for Jot! stemmed from the fact that many people download most journaling resources, but ultimately end up not using them frequently. We thought that if it were to send the user messages with prompts to think about, then it would create a more engaging product. It is mainly designed for students and has selectable categories such as career, mental health, and social life prompts in addition to the more general ones.

What it does

Jot!’s main feature is that it will send the users a daily prompt to respond to at a time of their choosing. These responses get stored, and the user is able to look back at their previous responses. The website also has a to-do section, which users can utilize as a reminder of important events or anything the need to get done, essentially functioning as a calendar.

How we built it

We built a web application that integrates user authentication, task management, and email scheduling using Node.js, Express, and MongoDB. The application allows users to sign up, log in, schedule emails, manage to-do lists, view archived emails, and generate weekly reports. We integrated the Gmail API to send scheduled emails and check for replies within email threads. Key functionalities include password hashing for secure login, storing user data in MongoDB, and using the session for personalized access. Views are rendered using Handlebars and React for user interaction, while email scheduling and reply checking enhance communication flow.

Challenges we ran into

We are a team that came into this hackathon with very little experience in development. Despite that, we were able to make good progress into the realization of the product we had in mind when starting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Navigating development can be very daunting for people who are starting their career journey. We are proud to have come together as a team and work hard on our shared goal and that we all learned a lot from this experience.

What we learned

We learned that there are many aspects of development that we did not know about while starting out this journey. We found out that there was a steep learning curve to back-end coding that we needed to figure out how to navigate. We also gained experience with coding as a group and dividing tasks efficiently, since it was our first time developing as a team.

What's next for Jot!

We firstly would want to finish creating the website to implement our current ideas. After that in the future, we could consider expanding the structure by implement AI in order to try to identify prompts more suited for the user or adding new functions such as streaks.