Inspiration
In our school and my community, we see the constant need of support and mentorship. This led to the idea of MentorThis, which is a website that helps students find mentors and people willing to give advice.
What it does
This is a website built with Flask, a python library for creating HTML backend. It links someone to a mentor for their project. The user is presented with a functional login, signup, dashboard and even a portfolio page all built for the main goal of linking a student to a mentor.
Workflow (How I built it)
Again, we built this website using Flask. In Flask, you have different routes that display different webpages. These webpages have a variety of usages from a login to a portfolio. I used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end and Flask and SQLAlchemy for the backend. Additionally, I used a bit of bootstrap for styling
Our Challenges
One challenge was just formatting the code. Lots of files lead to lots of messes and without proper organization, you will fall off. One example of this is my styles.css. I used one entire CSS file for the entire website (with the addition of bootstrap for easy styling) and this led to a lot of time being wasted on finding certain things. Another issue that I faced was just finding the correct documentation. With so many modules, plugins and libraries nowadays, it's difficult to find a website that has a specific question you need answered.
What I liked
The one thing I liked especially on MentorThis is how much it taught me. I had experience working on HTML and Python, but never on Javascript or any backend. This led to countless hours of watching tutorials, reading articles online, and getting help on discord. In the end, however, I learned a lot and am thankful for taking this large step in the right direction.
The Future
I would like to just define the styling a lot more in the future. Spending so much time on the backend had led me astray from the front-end and I am not exactly proud of it. The website does what it does, and some front end features look alright, so I'm still proud of it.
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