NewRoots

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Inspiration

All of us are first-gen or second-gen immigrants, and we have been actively involved in communities in which many people close to us--who are immigrants--face issues in integrating within the United States. Besides the societal discrimination, many immigrants face problems in finding resources and communities that can support them, and our help can help fix that.

What it does

Our app allows immigrants to create accounts, identifying their demographics, and display them on their profiles. It enables them to use a map to identify resources in their area, see a list of local events and communities that may apply to them, and message other users belonging to their respective groups to foster community building.

How we built it

Our web application utilizes Neon and PostgreSQL to provide a database that stores user account information. We also used Node.js to build the front and back-end. By making multiple pages tied together and Tailwind, we were able to streamline to quantity of files needed, removing the need for external style sheets and enabling clear file structure.

Challenges we ran into

We had numerous challenges while implementing this solution. For example, message storage also proved tricky to balance between persistence and efficiency, as our initial implementation overloaded the page and caused an error. Authentication functions were also different as the update from v4 to v5 changed many of the conventions we were familiar with using.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our product as a whole, but especially proud of our visual design, which we carefully crafted to maximize user-friendliness and browsing experience. We also are proud of both our user log-in system, and messaging functions, which required more complicated back-end code compared to other pages.

What we learned

We learned a lot about React and Tailwind, as most of us had minimal prior exposure to these languages. We also learned more on visual design through the careful and repeated iterations on the visual components of our web app. Finally, we learned a lot about managing a collaborative team environment, ensuring that everyone had something to do and managing workloads between members as much as possible.

What's next for NewRoots

To expand the target audience to include immigrants outside the United States, make it even more feasible for those with language differences, and establish a stronger social media implementation (making posts, identifying oneself as a event creator, etc.).