SecondPlate

Inspiration

Research found that stay-at-home mums around the world experience feelings of loneliness and isolation due to limited opportunities to socialize and connect with others. We wanted to provide a solution to this problem. And what better way to connect with people than food?

What it does

Our app, SecondPlate, provides an accessible platform for stay-at-home mums to connect with others in their community through food-related experiences. Users can either host their own events and share homemade food with others, or browse and attend events hosted by members of the community.

How we built it

SecondPlate was built with Spring Boot as the backend framework and Thymeleaf to render the HTML/CSS frontend. For the database, we used MySQL running in Docker. Lastly, we used Maven for build and compilation. Java was used as our main language.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced was during the ideation process: many existing platforms already offer solutions similar to our initial idea. We struggled to find a feature that would make us stand out from the others. We spent a considerable amount of time brainstorming and refining our concept. After some team ideation and discussions with mentors, we were able to come up with a unique solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the accomplishments we were proud of was that we was able to follow the idea from start to finish. Making a full-stack application in two days was not a trivial task. The process from ideating, getting feedback, reiterating on the idea, design, and finally development - it was fulfilling to see the end result after all the hard work poured into what started as a small idea. We were able to integrate the frontend with backend seamlessly and watch our product come to life.

What we learned

This hackathon has taught us a lot of things. Under a short time period of two days, we were able to work and learn things rapidly under pressure. It was a big learning curve to figure out how the Spring framework works, and how it communicates to the database with Docker Compose. We were able to explore how to make full-stack applications through implementing features like user sessions, inter-user messaging features, and having a working database that renders through the frontend. Moreover, we learnt how to ideate, take feedback into practice, and team collaboration.

What's next for SecondPlate

One of the concerns that our app has is security involved in inviting strangers to homes. We want to enforce security through verified profiles such as using government ID checks and two factor authentication. We also want to integrate an interactive Maps API to the app for users to browse events near them. Lastly, we would also like to add mobile compatibility and responsiveness in different viewpoints.