Poodue

Inspiration

The main inspiration behind Poodue stemmed our team's focus for this hack-a-thon, to create a fun and somewhat silly app that had the potential to impact students here on Purdue's campus. Hence, Poodue.

What it does

Poodue revolves around its fully interactive map which has all bathroom locations on campus laid out for all the users. All bathrooms, which are geo located using google maps API, have the ability to be reviewed and commented on by users - the data then being publicly available for other users to see. There are also other fun features such as an overall ranking list and forum to see all recent comments.

How we built it

The app was built in VScode using the ReactJS framework and included additional APIs such as a Google Maps. The backend was also built in VScode using CockroachDB to host the database. The project frontend was written in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, while the backend was written in Java.

Challenges we ran into

This project was riddled with challenges for us. For starters, every tool I mentioned above, save for the languages, was entirely new to our entire team. This meant that we had tons of headaches and long walks through documentation land as we tried to learn our frameworks alongside creating a project. We also had a multiplicity of issues with CockroachDB, as the framework went down overnight, and we lost all potential momentum of our project due to being unable to test our backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While we didn't progress as far as we expected to go, despite no prior knowledge of ReactJS and very very limited knowledge of JS and databases, we managed to build a fun and intricate app that is of benefit to all Boilermakers - a great success in its own right.

What we learned

Aside from all the frameworks and tools we learned over the course of this project, through the unexpected bumps of this hack-a-thon, we learned a pretty big lesson - mainly, how to overcome ruinous challenges and how to persevere through them. None of us could've predicted that at the very moment that we got our database working, that CockroachDB would go down ruining all potential testing for us, and effectively ending our project in the process. But despite this overwhelming obstacle, we stayed positive, and worked to find solutions while remaining in high spirits.

What's next for Poodue

We enjoyed building an app that required a little bit of love for Purdue to build. We'll continue to iron out the app and hopefully, after resolving all database issues, be able to release it for all Purdue to enjoy!