Inspiration
Me, and many other Black immigrants that I know, struggle to adapt to life in America. We rarely, if ever, meet other people of the same culture. More times than not, our cultural identity is lost after a generation or two, due to our struggle to assimilate and a lack of representation for our home cultures. To make matters worse, information available online often provides a eurocentric view of our own culture.
What it does
Roots. This is a platform that creates and fosters a community for Black immigrants of any certain origin. They are able to rely on each other to adjust to life in the US while maintaining a strong connection to their heritage. The community creates a base of knowledge on their culture and history, solidifying the Black perspective.
How we built it
We built a django project in python for our backend and made a react project for our frontend. We made model classes of what would be perspectives, events and tags on our platform. We made API calls that would communicate with our frontend. We did our best to connect it with the frontend. We do not have all our tests passing. Our frontend for the most part is represented by figma wireframes.
Challenges we ran into
Our first major roadblock in this project occurred during the initial brainstorming phase. Trying to finalize an idea proved to be more difficult than we anticipated under the given circumstances. Once we finally fleshed out our idea we again wanted to confirm that it would still meet the requirements for the code black track. We hit another minor roadblock when one of our group memes had to resign for the rest of the competition. Their mental and physical health was our team's main concern and thankfully after some rest they seem to be in good spirits again. Lastly, the development process reached a stopping point on the front end due to a lack of knowledge on building front end projects. Our team almost entirely consists of back-end developers so we weren’t able to spend as much time building a complete project as we would have liked.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of how far we were able to come with this being our first time building projects outside of class. Stepping outside our collective comfort zones will certainly prove useful in the future and we can't wait to sign up for more hackathons.
What we learned
This entire hackathon provided us with a lot of valuable lessons; brainstorming, creating wireframes, working with React, and improving development skills. For most of our members this was the first time we actually built a project outside of coding classes at North Carolina State University(NCSU). We also used Figma for the first time and were able to create a wireframe to properly present our idea to the judges. The early stages of this project helped develop our brainstorming skills, being able to articulate our ideas and iron out flaws before implementation was key to creating a timeline .
What's next for Roots
For the future we're going to look to properly connect the front and back end services. Long term goals include expanding and providing incentives for attendance live events hosted by community members.