Productify

Inspiration

No one went into the pandemic knowing what to expect. Across universities, career fields, and even nations, people from all over reported being less productive during quarantine and acutely feeling that way. It's natural. But that doesn't mean we can't find ways to boost ourselves back up and strive to be the people we want to be again.

This is why we created Productify.

What it does

Team Productify has created a productivity tracker with two components. The browser extension tracks the base URL of the sites that the user frequents, while the website displays the user's productivity metrics based on the analytic data from the extension. The site also features a nifty editable to-do list to organize the user's tasks in one space, with a corresponding graph tracking the user's progress.

How we built it

We storyboarded our design using Figma. We used React, JS, and html, as well as other visualization libraries in order to cleanly display our data. Finally, we used Go and MongoDB for the browser extension and the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Every member of our team took this hackathon as a chance to push our boundaries and work at one level higher than what we were used to. Most of our team members have barely touched React, while the fourth member who knew React decided to tackle browser extensions. Because of this, we had our fair share of challenges.

Notable ones include figuring out the a-synchronicity of browser extensions, code integration of independently developed components, and further. Each one pushed our limits and furthered our knowledge in this field.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Because each of us have pushed our limits with this project, each of us have made something we take pride in. We have made a stellar website that is dynamic, intuitive, and pleasing to look at, working with everything from browser extensions to mathematical representations of this data. A team really is greater than the sum of its parts.

What we learned

Every hackathon has been an exercise in balancing innovation, feasibility, and surprisingly teamwork. At the end of this hackathon, we can confidently say we've greatly increased our team synergy.

Hackathons start out with grand ideas that slowly get whittled down as new feasibility concerns arise. It takes a lot to maintain the same grandeur we had before, and even more to be willing to concede when something is simply not possible within the constraints we had. It's humbling.

And we grow from it.

What's next for Productify

There were a few things we could not complete due to the time limit of the hackathon. We hope to completely integrate the browser extension with the backend database, and hook up the database to populate our analytics with real-time data!

Further things in the work was a notification feature from our browser extension, a user-set alarm of sorts for when the user has been on Youtube for a bit longer than advised. We regretfully were not able to have small pixelated dogs run across the screen by the end of this hackathon.