runnerspace

Inspiration

The inspiration for runnerspace was from us wanting to fit the retro theme, as well as our liking for the old-school aesthetic of more vanilla-ish web design.

What It Does

runnerspace serves as a platform for UTSA students to socialize. Currently, runnerspace supports profile pages, an explore page for finding new friends, and a live feed page with comments on posts.

How We Built It

runnerspace was built using html, css, JavaScript, Sass, Font Awesome, Flask, SQLite, and SQLAlchemy.

Challenges We Ran Into

The initial biggest challenge we ran into was deciding on a project. Initially, we were going to create a game, but because of a separate issue, we decided to switch scope after about 6 hours of hacking. Once deciding on runnerspace, we faced issues with scope creep of the front-end, as well as struggling with deciding and implementing a relational database design. We also went into this project knowing that it was too large of a scale to do within 24 hours, so we were intentionally planning on making a smaller version of what we imagine a social media site to be. Unfortunately, its very easy to get carried away working on improving certain features, and other features that needed to be worked on would sometimes get left out.

Accomplishments

We're proud that we made a project different from what we heard other people doing, and we're also glad that despite switching projects a good fraction of the way through the competition, we were able to tackle a lot of the large features for a mini social media site.

What Did We Learn?

Biggest thing that we learned is that we need to plan further ahead of time for hackathons. As far as technologies go, it was a very good experience getting more familiarized with databases, and seeing how insanely complex the relations are between posts, profiles, and the interactions between the two.