RateMyItinerary

Inspiration

We wanted to create something that is not already mainstream like reddit, and useful at the same time. "I have friends traveling to Korea in November and heard that they were using Google Docs to plan their trip. I just thought there had to be a better solution than Google Docs" - Chaney

What it does

The app serves as a forum for travel guides created by locals. This site provides free guides that can be rated by users and help promote travel as well as unify communities. Authors could create itineraries by adding in activities to do, such as hiking, shopping, festivals, and restaurants! Users would also be able to search for specific locations they are travelling to, to help narrow their search. Using the Mastercard location api, we hoped to add some information revealing which restaurants accepted Mastercard.

How we built it

HTML/CSS/Javascript - Frontend Express.JS - Backend MongoDB - Storing data

Challenges we ran into

All three of us are novices when it comes to web development. HackWashU was Jeffrey's and Ron's first hackathon where they were learning HTML/CSS/Javascript for the first time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to work together for 12 hours two days in a row without losing focus which is pretty hard these days with social media and games lol. Additionally, having a somewhat functioning website was pretty cool, granted the limited time we had and our already busy school lives.

What we learned

Chaney - Having worked mostly on frontend in the past I tried diving deeper into learning about the backend side working with Express.js. I learned more about MVC architecture (even though we didn't implement it due to time), the axios library (very helpful), and solidifying my knowledge on html/css/javascript when assisting Jeffrey and Ron with questions. I believe that it is an extremely important skill for software engineers to help mentor others and learning how to explain concepts which is a challenge in it of itself.

Jeffrey - Having this be my first hackathon and first time diving into web development. I learned a ton about HTML/CSS and Javascript. I even learned a little bit about the backend and how the front and backend connect with each other. I also learned about version control with git and UI/UX design.

Ron - I learned more about front-end and back-end. For front-end I learned more about html, but css mostly and how to style a web page. For back-end I learned how to get a data from a database and use that information for the web page.

What's next for RateMyItinerary

We hope to mainly improve the UI for creating an itinerary to make it more extensive with widgets and drag-n-drop features for activities as well as provide a list of restaurants with ratings using Google's API/Yelp's API. We also hope to complete the Mastercard implementation :).