localhand

Web application to help small businesses grow.

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Inspiration

No more than ever, it's been important to support small, local businesses and the goods they provide for the community. We felt that if we provided them with a platform that allows them to see how positively their products impact people, the more likely they are to continue working on their mission to provide goods and services to the people of the community. It also provides them with the opportunity to gain new customers using our hashtag #localhand.

What it does

Our application will show local businesses within your area with their basic information and operations. This includes the address, phone number, days of the week they are open, and the hours they are open each day. Then there is another page that focuses on the engagement between these small and local businesses and the people of its community with the use of our hashtag #localhand. This allows for the creation of a much stronger community.

How we built it

We first sat down together and started brainstorming on different ideas until we stumbled upon wanting to help small and local businesses. Once we figured that out, Karla and Adriana worked on wireframes for what the web application would look like. Simulating an experience that makes it easy for businesses to be a part of our platform. Their design was focused around creating a simple to use, yet seamless experience for both businesses and local customers alike.

We built our application primarily using React, the Twitter API, and Python. React to control most of what's shown on the front-end. The Twitter API to grab information on tweets using our hashtag #localhand. We wanted to implement a realtime stream of tweets, but considering that the standalone v1.1 version of the Twitter API has a limited amount of requests we decided to run it on a fixed data set with real tweets pulled from Twitter. Python was used to scrape Yelp on information from local businesses in order to populate our home page with local and small businesses to support in the area. The React work was done primarily by Arthur and the python web scraping was done by Ellie, who had the most technical experience with backend development.

Challenges we ran into

I don't think we ran into any real challenges. We all learned and grew from this experience in different capacities that allowed us to come together throughout the hackathon to provide a solid project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite some of us coming from different backgrounds, we were able to come together as a team to deliver a tangible product. We communicated effectively and helped each other out when needed. This was definitely one of the smoother experiences with working on a team.

What we learned

Reiterating some of the words from the previous prompt, we all learned how to get past the barrier of coming from different technical backgrounds and bringing them together.

What's next for localhand

We want to look into completing the application by getting a real-time stream of tweets for the Twitter feed and having businesses register on our application for free so that they can get more engagement from the community around them. We really believe this project can be good for anyone looking to support the businesses that are working to provide local goods and services to the people of their neighborhood. Also, adding a script that will automatically scrape information on a business that registers on our application without them needing to add their Yelp link.

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