ParadiseFound

Tired of the travel hassle? Welcome to the one-stop-shop for all your travel needs! With just one click, find events, hotels, weather, and travel safety information with ParadiseFound!

Comment

Alt text

What it does

ParadiseFound is a one-stop-shop for all the information you need to plan your next vacation! Users simply enter when and where their next vacation will be, and ParadiseFound takes care of the rest, providing a wide range of events, lodgings, weather, and more for users to explore during their stay.

How we built it

For our tech stack, we used CSS, HTML, and Bootstrap for the frontend, Flask and Python for the backend, and a number of APIs to request the information we displayed to the user. We were already familiar with HTML and CSS (and JS, in case we needed it), so it was a clear best choice when building a frontend. Bootstrap added a lot of flexibility to that, with fantastic built-in styles and structural components to make everything come together much faster. We also chose to use Flask because it was a lightweight and versatile option to link our frontend and backend.

Challenges we ran into

Front-End challenges:

Pure HTML and CSS are always difficult to work with, even with a great library like Bootstrap. Our biggest challenge was designing a beautiful website that could be feasibly built within a short timeframe. Formatting in particular was difficult because of variable effects of certain HTML attributes on different scopes within our program

Back-End challenges:

Our biggest challenge was deciphering all the new APIs we needed to learn in order to fetch data for the website, and creating methods to parse each one. This was our first time trying to independently parse through json, which meant we had a big learning curve when implementing and parsing our first API, Ticketmaster.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to create a fully-functional website that looked and functioned beautifully by learning HTML, Bootstrap, and CSS. Also, we were proud that we adapted well as our plans changed based on the needs of the group. In terms of the backend, we're proud that we were able to create functions to parse through six unrelated APIs. It was a great learning experience and allowed us to make a more complex, dynamic application. Lastly, we were most proud of our teamwork and synergy. We fully comitted to splitting into frontend and backend teams, which worked great! We meshed really well and were able to develop a fullstack application that was greater than the sum of our parts by having defined roles and communicating with each other. 🙂

What we learned

In just 36 hours, we were able to gain a lot of experience in the following areas by researching and trial and error:

  • connecting frontend and backend to make a fullstack application
  • making API requests and parsing responses
  • manage multiple nested HTML structures
  • using HTML and CSS attributes to improve website UI

What's next for ParadiseFound

ParadiseFound has a lot of potential, and we plan to work on it in the future. Since it's a fully-functional web application, we have the option to add features such as flight information, transportation upon arrival, local eats, and more. While very limited in scope now, by incorporating more of these elements, ParadiseFound could be the definitive first step in vacation planning, offering essential information packaged in a clean way.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates