Retriever Ruckus!

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Inspiration

How often have you walked right past people enjoying a fun recreational game on campus? Have you ever wondered if you could join them? What if you knew that game is open to new players? With Retriever Ruckus, we aim to take all the guesswork out of situations like this! We believe that students genuinely do want to get active and become more involved with their campus, yet today's social networks largely leave these wishes unmet. Our vision for this web app was to break through the normal barriers of entry; to find a middle ground between a direct approach and relying on invites to group messaging.

What it does

Retriever Ruckus uses your location data to show you active events in your immediate vicinity. For example, if you see an ongoing game of basketball in the RAC, or what looks like the beginnings of a soccer match, Ruckus users within range of the court will be able to share that event and inform other users that they are welcome to join!

How we built it

For our webhosting, we used SADNET, which is the System Administration and Software Development Club's student cloud platform. Its completely free for UMBC students, and we had our APIs serving to the open internet within a couple of hours. Our incredibly talented back-end dev worked tirelessly to create a full mongodb/nodejs/react stack. Our front-end dev and graphic designer worked together to make some truly impressive user interface, complete with a stylish logo. For our back-end, we opted for a node.js server running express. Mongodb simply kept the coordinates of all known recreation areas on campus for the web app to reference. We decided on OpenStreetMap for our map API, and pieced together the front-end in React. To keep the web app interactive, we used socket.io to accurately keep track of the users position and paired it with some business logic to notify users when they are within range of an event.

Challenges we ran into

Opting to render maps and keep real-time GPS records inside of a pure web app was a risky move. It took up a lot of our time, but we ended up with a product with near identical performance to that a full mobile app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of the final product that was produced within this 24 hour period. We believe it is a testament to our team's diverse skillset and great teamwork abilities.

What we learned

_ Front-end, front-end, front-end! _ We'd say the thing we learned the most from this hackathon is the importance of front-end developing. Once we started diving into how the user actually interacts with the web app, we quickly realized that a whole lot goes into turning that input into something the back-end could actually use.

What's next for Retriever Ruckus!

This web app is fully live! In the coming weeks we would like to see if this web app has any sort of place in our community. If so, we are definitely interesting in adding additional features and expanding our reach! Thank you HackUMBC 2022!