ManageMental

For remembering the important things that are still over the horizon.

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An exploration of the LAMP stack by a person who's never touched it before.

Inspiration

An oil change every 3 months, tire rotation every 6 months, carbon monoxide detector change every 5 years, a new fire extinguisher every 12 years... who can keep track? Not every important management task in life is waiting just over the horizon. Some tasks exist on an enormous - yet still important - timeline. For those tasks, there's ManageMental.

Other websites and apps let you set reminders. ManageMental will take the most important things in your life and do the hard work for you, figuring out common maintenance tasks, recommending timelines, and sending reminders. Best of all, there's no app you need to keep or account you need to log into to check your reminders - ManageMental will send reminders right to your inbox - whether that's next month, or ten years down the line.

What it does

Give users a selection of things that they may want to keep track of (their house, car, children, pets, etc.) and provide recommendations for maintenance tasks and their timelines. Users can create an account with an email and password, which will store their responses (response storing only fully implemented for House object.)

What it does not do (yet)

Calculate dates for sending out email reminders and actually send them out. Planned implementation will use SendGrid's email API (https://sendgrid.com/solutions/email-api/).

How I built it

I launched a LAMP stack on Google's Compute Engine. The website was built using the classic combination of HTML, Javascript, and CSS, and SQL was handled through phpmyadmin.

Challenges I ran into

Having never properly done web dev before, it was difficult to even know where to begin. Google Cloud made this a little easier by giving me a LAMP stack template to work off of, but from there on it was a lot of trial and error to get something that worked and also looked decent.

In hindsight, I wish I had focused more on back-end before turning to front-end development. However, with one object (house) working, the others could be very similarly implemented.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Though it only fully works (from front-end to back-end) for the "house" object, I'm proud that I was able to get my data traveling through the entire stack.

What I learned

It's a good idea to figure out what kind of tech you want to use during a hackathon ahead of time, and get in a little practice so that you know the tools at your disposal!

What's next for ManageMental

First and foremost, get all of the objects working! After that the code could certainly use a good deal of refactoring and optimization. This project was a code playground rather than a code masterpiece.

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