Inspiration
As beginner programmers who are mainly bioengineers, we decided to participate in our first hackathon to try to create a product that can help the healthcare community. We are all very passionate about giving back to our community and helping others through technology and we wanted to utilize our basic computer programming skills from CS61A and CS61B and apply our biology backgrounds to create a user-friendly website. We all believe that healthcare should be accessible for everyone and currently, seeing a doctor and receiving medication is unnecessarily expensive. As a result, we wanted to create a product that can tackle this problem.
What it does
After considering multiple ideas and setbacks, we decided to learn HTML/CSS within a day to code a web-application that recommends over the counter drugs for common health conditions such as eczema, common cold, dizziness, etc. The website is a quiz, where the patient answers multiple-choice questions that leads them to a certain drug that they should buy to treat their condition, or for them to seek a physician if the symptoms seem more severe.
How we built it
We used HTML and CSS to create the webapp.
Challenges we ran into
We have never entered a hackathon before and it was our first time learning HTML/CSS. We also do not have any web development experience, so it took a long time searching up YouTube tutorials to learn what to download and the syntax. On Friday night, we came up with a bunch of ideas, but all of them seemed too complicated to implement. After deciding on an idea, we tried to code for several hours but then gave up because nothing was working and we thought we were going nowhere. We also saw other peoples' ideas and projects and thought ours was oversimplified. We thought that we were not capable of creating this idea and that if we had more computer science experience, we would do better. However, after receiving support from many mentors and peers and taking many breaks, we decided to continue our project within hours of the deadline. We realized that CalHacks is the perfect time for us to learn and grow as computer scientists, and we should not waste this opportunity.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
While our web-application may appear very simple at first, we did spend many hours trying to get it to work. We are very proud of creating a functional website that can be useful for the health community in terms of educating people about over-the-counter medications. We are also very proud of our resilience and ability to persevere despite barely having any computer science experience, let alone web development experience. We learned how to work together in a team, as well as communicate our problems with our peers and mentors when needed.
What we learned
We learned that there are so many resources out there and that even the most amateur coders can create a project that may be impactful for our community. Not only did we learn technical skills, but we also learned how to work as a team and not give up, despite so many challenges in our way. We also learned that while there are already so many experienced programmers here, we should not be intimidated, because everyone had to start from the basics in order to become better programmers.
What's next for Self Diagnosis
We will definitely implement more features, including inputting more databases on over-the-counter medications. We also want to turn this into a mobile app and make the front end look more user-friendly.
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