MotivMates

Inspiration

It's been proven that having someone keep you accountable for goals helps keeps you productive, stop procrastinating, and actually finish and see your goals to the end. For example, if one person would like to study more times a week and another person wants to read more books in that same week, they could keep each other accountable for their goals, and thus both people benefit from that relationship. We were inspired to help people create these kind of "contracts" with their friends so they could keep their friends and themselves accountable for their goals.

What it does

MotivMates is a web application meant to keep your friends and yourself accountable by entering "contracts" with them. Users can add friends and set-up contracts with them, where they each must complete a goal they set for themselves with a set deadline. Users keep each other accountable because only the other person can mark the other person's goal as completed. At the successful completion of a contract each friend will gain friendship points and can re-create a new contract with them.

How we built it

We used React with Javascript as our web framework and HTTP and CSS to develop our website. We used Firebase for the backend database, and Git for version control within our team.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial plan was to create a mobile app using React Native. However, we bumped into a lot of issues that we couldn't resolve quickly since none of us were particularly proficient at developing a mobile app or using React Native, so we downgraded to React for a web application, which was a good idea since it got us up and running quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

From going from React Native to React, we are proud that we were able to create a web application that has a lot of the underlying functionality that we had planned out at the beginning. We set up Firebase with a correct schema and were able to get basic functionality such as sending friend requests to other people and having the friend requests and friends pop up in user's accounts, corresponding to the correct friend relations. Most of us had little experience if any using Firebase, so it was impressive to see everything in the backend running smoothly.

What we learned

This was our first hackathon for some of us on the team. For the beginners, we learned a lot about good practices in version control, as well as how to use cloud services like Firebase for a backend database, React framework, HTML, and CSS. The members more experienced on our team learned about Firebase as a backend service.

What's next for MotivMates

We'd like to add some more basic functionality that we could not implement yet, such as the functionality to keep track of points between each friend. Also, we'd like to have a nicer interface and graphics.