Love Letters

Virtually Spreading Love and Positivity this Valentine's Day

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Inspiration

During the COVID-19 lockdowns myself and many others have been feeling the effects of isolation. This year is unique and many are finding it difficult as they cannot visit their loved ones. During this online hackathon, I’ve met lots of cool people from around the world in the MLH discord. This weekend alone has really lifted by spirits. This Valentine’s day I wanted to create a way to virtually spread love and positivity around the globe.

What it does

Love Letters enables you to spread love and positivity to others through virtual “love letters”. These can be in the form of notes, quotes, sayings, or really anything you want! You can submit a love letter which will be stored in a database to be shown to other visitors. When you want to receive love, you can ask the site for a random love letter.

How I built it

My goal of this hackathon was to try out web development. Using HTML, CSS, and Javascript, Love Letters is currently hosted as a static website. This weekend I also experimented with and learned about NodeJS as I planned to use it to incorporate CockroachDB to act as the storage for the love letters.

Challenges I ran into

While I learned a lot and had a ton of fun, LoveLetters.study currently stands as a prototype with no functional database. The main reason for this is that as a beginner in web development and working solo, I just did not have enough time to pack in all the learning and implementation in one weekend. I look forward to expanding on this project in the future as I gain more experience!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I most proud of my gained experience with front-end development. Back-end development has always been my stronger suit and I’m glad I decided to challenge myself and expand my knowledge during Hackthrob.

What I learned

This weekend was jam packed full of learning experiences. I threw myself right into the deep end of web development and learned a ton about web design with HTML/CSS as well as using Javascript and NodeJS to bring websites to life. I also learned about API’s and using SQL queries to store and retrieve data from databases. This knowledge is sure to help me in many future projects! I also looked into PHP a bit this weekend and while it didn’t make it into my project it was definitely a good experience.

What's next for Love Letters

The next steps for Love Letters are to integrate the CockroachDB database using NodeJS. Beyond that I would love to improve the website design and maybe add additional features such as a “love” button and counter for each love letter.

A note for judges

For the best domain name category: While I own the domain loveletters.tech from Domain.com , my hack is currently only hosted on loveletters.study from GoDaddy. (as of February 14th, 2021)

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