Local

Platform to bring together the community to support local businesses and non-profit organizations

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Inspiration

There are tons of unknown local businesses and events that happen across the city of Santa Cruz that are sometimes missed. It seems like only people incredible involved in the city come across them through posters or word of mouth but what about those that just got here? Students and new residents trying to engage and further their community could find it difficult and tedious searching for events. Using the technology we have today, we could simplify this search and have people readily start participating and giving back to their community.

What it does

Local is catered toward small, local businesses as well as non-profit organization. It serves as a platform to assist these businesses grow and get more impact in their community. At the same time, Local helps bring people together who don't own business by allowing them to become more aware of what is going on in their community and participating in events.

How I built it

It is currently an iOS application built on XCode using Google's free back-end serivce Firebase.

Challenges I ran into

Working with a back-end database (firebase) and learning to use the relationships between blocks of data Learning and utilizing paging, custom views, and open source libraries for smoother UI/UX Lots of app interface bugs

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Connected a two-sided application, though it is still very rough, and managed to create a every day user side of the application where people can find events to go to as well as a business side where local businesses and organizations can post their events and get feedback. All uddates are live and instantaneous.

What I learned

I've simultaneously realized how difficult it can be to program a fully functional application and now why it takes so much time but also how rewarding the experience is! I have definitely grown a lot in my knowledge of app flow, databases, and how to bring information to people through a mobile application.

What's next for Local

I would really love to see people using with the application to create a richer experience of life for themselves, others and their city's local businesses. I hope to keep working on the application past the Hackathon and one day have it help build stronger communities.

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