Lighthouse

Inspiration

After the #porteouverte phenomenon during the 2015 Paris attack, our teammate Alex Gurung was inspired to take advantage of technology to

What it does

Lighthouse works by matching generous homeowners with those who have been displaced by unfortunate incidents based on their location, duration of stay, and capacity. The focus is on finding shelter as quickly as possible.

How we built it

We used Flask and MongoDB to store data on the backend, and React Native to create the Android app. Using the React Native framework allows us to relatively painlessly port over to iOS in the future.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first experience with both MongoDB and React Native. We spent the first three or so hours learning the framework, and didn't break ground on the application until around 8pm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of building a very stable backend and figuring out 2 separate deployment methods for "redundancy".

What we learned

We learned how to work with React Native and MongoDB. More specifically, we learned everything, from how to develop using an emulator with React to how to use Python to integrate with MongoDB to using flask_restful to build a flask restful API.

We also learned that Github organizations are useful when you don't want three different repositories on three different accounts.