SheTreks

connecting women who love the outdoors

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Inspiration

Each member of our team had outdoor experiences before college, but we all found a deep sense of camaraderie and connection in doing outdoor trips with new people, fellow students, through an organization called SC Outfitters. Our passion for the outdoors, meeting new people, and finding safe spaces for women to connect inspired the SheTreks platform.

What it does

SheTreks is a web application that brings female outdoor enthusiasts together by facilitating the organization of group trips. Users can create and join trips with friends or the general community, contribute and view real reviews of activities, and save lasting memories in a sort of digital scrapbook on their profile. The platform empowers women to plan and participate in outdoor adventures in a way that is tailored their comfort level.

How we built it

The SheTreks platform was built collaboratively by our team, each member contributing their expertise to different aspects of the project:

Ariana: Developed Firebase functionalities including Firestore, Authentication and Storage and the core functionality for the user profile and trip pages

Bridget: Implemented the map feature, search functionality, and applied styling to enhance the user experience

Ellen: Focused on the login and signup processes with extensive user verification and regex, ensuring a seamless onboarding experience for users

Our tech stack includes React for the frontend, Node.js for the backend, and Firebase for database services. We additionally included an OpenMapBox API, and have plans to include the GPT-4 API and The Weather Channel API.

Challenges we ran into

This hackathon was an exhausting 24 hours of brainstorming ideas, debugging errors, assessing feasibility, reaching milestones, and experiencing frustration. One of the challenges we encountered was reaching our Firebase quota around 5:30am, prompting us to examine our usage of state in React and explore alternative solutions so we'd have enough credits to continue working.

Additionally, as we delved into the intricacies of React, we encountered challenges related to asynchronous programming (async/await) since we were communicating back and forth with the database so often, but overcoming these hurdles strengthened our understanding of the framework.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of building a full-stack website from scratch. Each of us had different expertise on different parts of the stack, but we all got more well-rounded skills with the parts we hadn't worked with much before. Another notable accomplishment is Bridget's elaborate work with the map and search feature, enabling the user to see activities visually.

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