Stamped

• 

  Home Page

• 

  The Beautiful Map

Inspiration

As college students, it’s easy to get into a cycle of doing the same thing over and over again. Going to the same classes, eating the same food, and especially seeing the same places every day. It can really drive you insane sometimes. Stamped is a way to break that cycle. By providing challenges and unique locations no matter where you are, all you need to do is find the marker and have fun. You can explore places you’ve never been before, even if you’ve lived there your entire life. You can meet a community of people who also seek new experiences. And finally, you can break the cycle of a monotonous routine and live a healthier and happier life.

What it does

The website presents a virtual map, chock-full of hot-spot locations and points of interest with challenges that users can travel to in real life. Once they complete the challenge, users snap a photo and upload it to the website to get Stamped for that point of interest, additionally marking the associated location as explored. The more stamps the user gets, the more they get to fill out the map and show off to their friends!

How we built it

We primarily built this website in React with Next.js on the frontend and Express.js on the backend. We used the Google Maps API for the virtual map and the Google Drive API to store photos. Using the built-in photo metadata, we were able to determine which photos were actually in range of the task. Finally, we used SQLite to store all the user, location, stamp, etc. information.

Challenges we ran into

We decided on our project idea very late (like a few hours before arriving at UCLA), so the scope of our project was very vague throughout. We had a lot of cool features in mind such as a friends system, multiple challenges, difficulty levels, more complex borders, etc. but we weren’t sure exactly what was being implemented and we underestimated the amount of time it would take to finish and fully develop our core features. As a result, we struggled with some miscommunication errors and finishing the project on time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re definitely super proud of how much compartmentalization we were able to make ourselves as a team. For every feature, we found some unique niche that each of us fit to make the development process as seamless and parallel as possible could have. I’d say we’re especially proud of how we were able to start from pitches that kept going in circles on the train here, all the way to a fully fledged app capable of connecting us all to the places we go together.

What we learned

Definitely, the biggest thing we learnt is how important sleep is; towards the end of the project, we all hit big walls caused by sleep deprivation. No matter how on fire we may be, nothing seemingly can stop that roller coaster of a wall. Another perhaps equally important lesson (and more technically focused) would be how important organization becomes in constructing our project. Perhaps one reason why we felt we were able to at least keep productive was because of how organized our repo, internal workflow, and general project structure were in maintaining modularity and clear divisions.

What's next for Stamped

Definitely to make locations match to physical boundaries that characteristically define many important landmarks and areas in LA. Additionally, expanding the reach of Stamped to include the entire US and eventually even the world would be an incredible goal to reach. As part of that, perhaps employing web scraping algorithms to find authentic experiences and places outside of generally well-known places in an area.

Beyond that, adding more ways to engage with others, stamps through perhaps likes, notes to each other, among other features would make Stamped a more dynamic and interactive way to engage with friends.

Built With

• express.js
• gemini
• next
• react
• sqlite
• tailwind
• typescript