Inspiration
Have you ever been to an event with someone and wanted to leave, but didn’t know if your friend wanted to leave yet? You could ask them, but it might hurt their feelings.
What it does
Our web app turns this into a party game style experience. Create a room, wait for your partner to join, and then you can both independently mark when you're ready to leave. Whether or not your partner also chose to leave is only revealed once you're both ready. No one person has to feel pressured.
How we built it
We created a Node.js web application with Express.js, and host it on a VPS. We used GoDaddy's free domain so that it's available for anyone to try at letsgo.casa
Challenges we ran into
We are all new to web development, so implementing this app and communicating between devices was a real challenge. Since we also wanted to deploy it, we needed to rent a VPS and point our new domain name to the server, which took a bit of troubleshooting.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're really proud that we were able to make the app actually work between two real devices, and get it hosted on the public internet. Coming from learning C++ in our coursework, this was a real challenge and it took a lot of research and troubleshooting.
What we learned
We learned a lot about hosting a single page app. We needed to not only make the app, but also write code for the backend, deploy it, and edit DNS records for our domain so that it pointed to our deployment. We learned about choosing the right architecture based on constraints and cost, too. Lastly, we are happy we chose a stack outside of our expertise, since it forced us to learn more about how web applications work and how they compare to the console applications we usually write in C++ in our coursework.
What's next for Let's Go Home
Ideally, we would have made this concept as a mobile app instead of a web app so that you don't have to keep the webpage open, and instead get notifications. We'd also love to add a friends feature so you can quickly invite friends you frequently go to events with, without needing to exchange codes.
