Relax, It's Coming

You can keep an eye on it just in case

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Inspiration

The Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, the place where it all started. I used to work for a company called Twinex loading planes and scanning the various types of packages they shipped daily. Everything was smooth except for one thing, their god awful nearly 20-year-old inventory management/ tracking system. The employees had to use laptops as desktops rigged with TeamViewer in order to access a very old and slow database. It wasn't portable, there were tons of monthly expenses just to access it, and it wasn't getting updates any longer! I knew I could solve this problem with a web app and expand it to nearly any other shipping company in small to medium airports.

What it does

Relax, It's Coming is a customizable online inventory management system as well as a package tracking system for customers. Using barcodes generated at the time of receiving, packages are to be scanned at every step of the shipping process, keeping track of who it was scanned by when it was scanned, and where it was scanned. During the "in the air" and "in transit" phase the idea is to use googles location services to track the route of the plane or truck delivering the packages so the customer has complete transparency when it comes to the whereabouts of their package.

How I built it

I used react for the front end due to its extremely responsive design. This app involves a lot of real-time database updates which react handles perfectly with states. Many of the forms and UI elements are extremely similar in design so recycling handlers streamlined development. For the database I chose 8base, an easy to use Sequel based online database.

Challenges I ran into

I've never used GraphQL, the only way 8base communicates with the app so I was unable to connect the two and start posting/receiving data . Time management and sticking with one idea were my biggest challenges. I finalized an idea with about twelve hours left on the clock. I regret taking so long but I'm glad I choose this project, it has been on my mind for a while and this was the perfect time to prototype it. This is my first time using React in over a year, however, it's almost like riding a bike you ever really forget it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm very proud of the UI / color scheme I ended up with. I usually focus on Backend so having some frontend turn out aesthetically pleasing is a big accomplishment. I'm also proud of the way I structured the data. Originally I had planned to have almost 30 fields but I was able to minify it down to just eleven.

What I learned

I learned that not all your code has to come from scratch. During this hackathon, I tried to build everything my self slowly coming to the realization that everyone else's apps were so beautiful and they had so much time to work on the backend because of the help from others.

What's next for Relax, It's Coming

I plan on immediately finishing the backend this week. I'd like to integrate the ability to scan barcodes using phones or even generating QR codes. The biggest and most important goal for me is to integrate the tracking during transit. Amazon has implemented a similar practice recently and customers love it, it would be great for smaller businesses to be able to have those some reasources through my webapp.

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