Project

An application created with dedicated, precise, and specialized coding to ease and aid the community in all their efforts.

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Project Story

Everyone would like to think that our societies are becoming more and more progressive. However, in reality, it seems as though every 1 step we take forward, we take 2 more backwards. Within the recent years, we can see a rise in hate crime across the nation, hate crime against the LGBTQ community, against people of color, and people with different political views. We also see a rise in problems that are less immediate or visible to the eye. Climate change, gun ownership, homelessness, and more. While Matthew and I cannot possibly be able to solve every problem known to man, we can and will try to make it more easier and accessible. With every new invention, theory, and service, people will always try to improve on it, making it faster, easier, and cheaper to use. That is why we developed a web application that allows for anyone in any community to have fast and easy access to a platform that allows them to express themselves and call for others. With this app, ignorance is no longer an excuse to not step up and advocate for change. Ignorance will no longer be a driving force in countless reforms and efforts being overlooked. Ignorance will be turned into experience, fellowship, and knowledge.

What does it do?

“Project” gives its users, whether it be the coordinator of an event or a person attending an easier looking and using experience when it comes to hosting events ranging from food and toy drives to political caucuses with people who share interests. A coordinator can create an event by putting the time, place, and date, along with what the event is for and then posting it. An user can then scroll through the lists of projected events and see one they want to attend or help out at. They can then select said event, and will be directed to google maps where they can see exactly where the event is. To be more specific and selective when searching for events, users can filter events by general tags to narrow down the types of events they want to go to. Once again to be a more accessible application, we coded in a function for users to directly have a chat function with the organizers of the event, and all other guests attending the event, just by clicking the go button next to the event, allowing for bonding experiences, and clearing up any confusion. All in all, it's a platform that allows for people of all backgrounds to connect.

How we built it

We built the application using Vue as our frontend framework. This just made it easier to organize the project as well as allow us to make the application more complex without us worrying about creating a “backbone”. We also used Typescript as our programming language because, compared to Javascript, it allowed us to maintain a consistency when we were writing code. We utilized two APIs: Google Maps API and Firebase API. The Google Maps API provided the Google Map on the side of the application. The Firebase API provided many of the features on the application, which includes the Authentication, Database, and Hosting. Firebase was chosen over other alternatives because it was much easier to set up, and allowed us to write less code, but have the same functionality if we were to build everything by hand.

Challenges we ran into

To start, one of the challenges we had was deciding what to make to fit the theme of activism. The theme of activism encompasses a broad range of specific topics, which led to us to compile an extensive list of ideas, which we had issues choosing from. Also, Ivan had limited experience with programming, so we had to invest a portion of time teaching Ivan some of the components in the application. In addition, neither had any experience using the Firebase API or the Google Maps API, which required us to invest a heavy portion of our time to understand how it works and how to connect it to our project. Furthermore, Ivan and I had trouble deciding between designs that he made, which slowed progress just a little bit.

What's next for “Project”

We want to incorporate a web scraper AI that automatically searches the internet for any events that fall under the tags the application provides, for example food drives. This would be very helpful because not everyone has consistent access to a device or internet connection in which they can post their event. So this AI will help them by automatically putting their event on the website for users to see as long as the event is somewhat mentioned on the internet. On a more general note though, we want to expand this application to a larger scale, to a point where there are constant events being posted, and users actually using this application.

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