Just Webbit

Inspiration

The Internet provides opportunities to transcend social, economic, and geographic boundaries, to amplify voices and one’s presence, and to generate wealth. These opportunities, however, aren’t open to everyone.

What it does

Capitalizing on how more than 91% of the world’s population own a smart or feature phone and seeing the increased need for web presence given the surge of gig economy workers due to COVID, we created a free way for anyone to quickly spin up their own personal Web site by texting with Twilio or even calling a Twilio number.

How we built it

We used React, HTML, CSS for the front end; Node, Express for server side rendering; Postman for testing API calls; Firebase/Firestore for the database; and Twilio to receive input to send to the database.

Challenges we ran into

Through working together, we found it important to use shared language to ensure that everyone is on the same page with what expected deliverables look like to help move the project forward. In retrospect, a lot of our conversations - including sharing and referencing resources - happened in one channel, and the channel became a bit unwieldy to read through everything missed.

We were also very realistic about what we were able to accomplish within this short hacking period and transparent about how we wanted to work on our project. So although we started with grand visions, we had to be selective of what we wanted to have completed for our MVP/demo and how we did it - as we opted to create a React website from scratch than use a ready-made template.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We prioritized learning new technologies and techniques and made it work! Despite not having a designer or a front end dev on the team, we brushed up on React and made a clean website.

What we learned

We gained experience coding a project with a team, learned how to perform CRUD functions in Firebase/Firestore and pull data real-time into a React site, work and interface with Twilio, and dug deep to think of a cause we care about with a solution that can have far-reaching impact.