ReSME

Inspiration

25th January is the date that changed Malaysia forever. That was the day Covid-19 first set foot into Malaysia. Fast forwarding 2 months, on March 18th, the Malaysian government declared a nationwide lockdown under the term 'Movement Control Order' (MCO). This meant general prohibition of all houses of worship and business premises, except for supermarkets, public markets, grocery stores and convenience stores selling everyday necessities. All private premises except those involved in essential services were also closed. After over a year long of MCO, our country is suffering both economically and socially. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are struggling to survive due to many facts: 1) People are afraid to leave their houses 2) Some SMEs are located in a different district from their usual customers 3) Unverified rumours of positive covid cases at SMEs.

Covid-19 has severely put a hole through our country's economy and the SMEs are the ones who have been tanking the most. Even with the national recovery plan, many SMEs are still struggling to resume their businesses. This is where ReSME comes in.

What it does

ReSME acts as both a platform for SMEs to put themselves out there digitally, along with an app to help consumers discover new places they have never been to before. Besides that, our app also will help consumers be more aware of verified covid hotspots, instead of the usual Whatsapp news spreading. Users can add a new SME entry of 3 different categories (F&B, Services, Shops) to an existing database. This helps those SMEs who are not that tech-savvy to have a digital presence.

How we built it

We decided to go with a Vue.js + firebase stack. We decided to use a modern web framework as it'll save alot of time on various tasks. We also decided on firebase as it could both act as a host, and a database, and also was quick and easy to setup.

Challenges we ran into

Being a virtual hackathon, anyone from around the world can join. With Alvin in the United States and Kenji in Malaysia, our first problem was time difference. Being in different time zones, communication was harder and slower as one person's night would be another person's morning. This caused some issues in the different versions of frameworks we started out with. Besides that, what originally was a 3 person team became a 2 person team, as the 3rd member was nowhere to be seen. However, we both managed to overcome the challenge, and produce a product to be presented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being the first hackathon for both Alvin and Kenji, both of them are proud of what they have accomplished. Kenji was a fast learner, and managed to learn about the Vue framework and GoogleMaps API in just a day. Alvin also got his hands dirty in learning more about the evil language Javascript. Both are extremely proud of what they have managed to build in just under 24 hours, especially working in different timezones.

What we learned

1) Communication is key Not being in person side by side, we have to make sure we constantly communicate about what we've done to keep others in the loop. In person, it's a natural instinct to inform our teammates about any breaking changes or decisions that have been made. Virtually, it doesn't always come to our mind. We started out using different versions of Vue.js and different versions of Firebase. 2) Beta isn't always good Sometimes learning the newest version of a technology can backfire. In our case, we learnt that certain libraries and components still didn't support Vue3 yet, making us have to revert back to Vue2.

What's next for ReSME

You can only do so much with 2 developers working on something under a time constraint of 24 hours. With the initial features for ReSME set, we can now proceed on expanding phase 2 of our app. Some of the features that we that didn't make the cut this time but are in phase 2 include: 1) Feature to verify with shop owners if there were actually any positive covid cases 2) The ability for users can be anonymous donors to SMEs and donate money to help out businesses. 3) Working together with businesses to add more detailed information about their shop (restaurant menu, price of services offered, types of goods sold) 4) The ability for users to create an account (both consumers and shop owners) 5) Polishing up current existing features

We hope that by increasing the digital presence of SMEs along with accurate information about covid hotspots with ReSME, we can help businesses slowly get back on to their feet, along with helping everyday Malaysians find the next new lepak spot ;)

Built With

• firebase
• firestore
• google-maps
• vue.js