PeakPals

We built a platform that connects hikers looking for group adventures. Users can create hikes, join others based on skill level and pace, and coordinate everything in one place.

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Inspiration

Hiking is one of the best parts of living in Boulder, but it can be difficult to find people to hike with who have the same schedule, pace, or experience level. Many people end up hiking alone or struggling to coordinate trips. We wanted to build a simple platform that makes it easy to organize hikes and connect with other hikers.

What it does

PeakPals is a web app that helps users organize and join group hikes. Users can create hiking events with details like location, date, pace, experience level, and mileage. Other users can browse hikes, filter by preferences, and send requests to join. It also includes messaging, trail visualization via GPX integration, and carpool organization tools.

How we built it

We built PeakPals as a monolithic web application using Django. The backend manages user authentication, hiking events, join requests, and friendships. The frontend uses Django templates, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to display event and hiker information to the user.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was designing the relationships between users, hiking events, and requests so that organizers could approve and reject requests while keeping the system simple.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that in just 24 hours we built a fully functional platform that lets hikers discover events, connect with friends, and organize group hikes. Our focus was on creating a clean, intuitive experience that makes it easy for people to safely explore the outdoors together, and we feel we achieved a very polished final product for such a limited time frame.

What we learned

We learned how to quickly design and build a full-stack web application with Django, structure relational models for social features, and balance functionality with simplicity during a hackathon.

What's next for PeakPals

We would like to implement AI in order to help recommend hikes to the user based on different trends in the their hiking, as well as other factors like weather and proximity to the user.

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