SafetyAltNet

A safety check-in app for even those that live alternative lifestyles - whether it's by choice or by life's circumstances. Empower your everyday by sharing your location - but only if you need to.

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Inspiration

There are a lot of location check-in safety apps around, but I hesitate to use them because:

  • I don’t want to be sharing my location real time
  • Sometimes I don't want my friend/parents/etc to know where I'm going, even if they are my emergency contact.
  • I don’t want to bother people by telling them where I’m going every single time - especially if I think there’s a low chance of danger
  • I don’t want to have to pay for a subscription or download an app
  • I’m a bit paranoid with what happens with my data

What it does

This free webapp doesn't require downloading anything. Share your location as frequently as you like and with as many details as you'd like - we only notify your emergency contact if we haven't heard from you. We have some user use cases (+diagram), and more specifics in the docs here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oi1TN1eOhBZrVXlx5tlFtkJ9_xPq55juSZhNZ6j_eIU/edit?usp=sharing

How we built it

We split our team into 2 - front and back, nailed down the requirements, use cases, diagrams, etc in this linkgoogle doc . We used a kanban board to keep track of tasks (but soon lost control of it).

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately the backend team had a lot more time to work on their part, so the backend couldn't be tested too thoroughly at least with a real usecase. The backend can only be tried with POSTMAN. the front end can be tested locally with the usual bash npm i && npm run start. . Backend testing was also limited by Twilio texts so unfortunately there were some hard coding.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able do a lot of the backend, and even get JWT to working. We designed databases for the first time, tried task scheduling for the first time, etc.

What we learned

Communication is always key. I as a backend dev think maybe I should have called it quits on the backend early, keep it janky, and hopped on to the front end so that we would at least have the MVP.

What's next for SafetyAltNet

Some of the members may work on it after, as a personal project.

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