Inspiration
With the rise of social media, millions of users scroll their feeds mindlessly. With the scope of content available at just the tap of a finger, some people may find themselves too overwhelmed to contribute, or lost in the masses. This can make forming meaningful connections in online communities difficult. We wanted to make a web app that would promote artistic engagement through inspiration and regular motivation.
What it does
Show & Tell is a social media app that caters to makers, artists, and creatives. When you join, you select the categories that interest you (painting, photography, woodworking, etc.) and you are placed into a group of 55 other people. Every day, 5 of those people get to be in the spotlight, and post what they've been working on, either for feedback or for others' inspiration. For the next 9 days, the other 50 people take their turns in the spotlight, and everyone else gets to see their creations!
How we built it
For the front-end, we used Typescript with React and Tailwind CSS. On the back-end, we used Java with Spring, as well as Auth0 and MongoDB for authentication and database storage.
Challenges we ran into
Tailwind is great, but it is very finicky, and we had trouble getting it to cooperate with our layout needs. Additionally, connecting the back-end data structure to our post-structure in the UI ended up being more of a challenge than we expected.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We made a lot of progress in a short amount of time! Even though, we didn't get everything working perfectly, we ended up with a final product that demonstrates its potential for future development.
What we learned
Front-end is hard! Even with three people working on that side, our final UI isn't as polished as we'd have liked. But... we learned a lot about how front-end is developed and how important design communication is so that every contributor is on the same page.
What's next for Show & Tell
We'd like to continue developing and fleshing-out Show & Tell. The framework features need polishing and there's a lot of new functionality that we want to add. Stay tuned!
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