Stay-At-Home

Hello! We’re Stay At Home. We know how hard it is to stay productive and positive throughout recent times, so we pieced together everything that’s been helping us get through this onto the website!

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Inspiration

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many lives, and we were inspired to help those that are struggling through these difficult times. We want to show how practicing social distancing and staying at home is safe, but can also be fun, relaxing, and productive!

What it does

Our web application gives users various ideas or things to explore while staying at home! We have included features such as a task generator accompanied by a to-do list to increase productivity, an updated selection of trending movies and jokes for fun, as well as a relaxation channel presenting some Spotify playlists to vibe to!

How we built it

The frontend application was built with React, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. The backend was built with Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, and The Movie Database API.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we had a lot of goals. We wanted to create a todo list, utilize the Spotify API to link popular, trending songs, utilize the New York Times API for stay-at-home related news, create a task randomizer to give our users ideas on tasks to do, and have a feed of jokes to lighten the mood for our users. However, we quickly realized that, under this time constraint of 1 day, it would be a little difficult.

To combat these difficulties, we had some discussions on our priorities, and we readjusted the priorities of features in order to make our goal of finishing the project more feasible. For example, instead of learning and using the Spotify API, we embedded playlists onto the website. If we had more time, we’d definitely revisit this and dedicate a section to trending songs. Additionally, we realized that the New York Times API and other trend APIs (news in general) had headlines that could induce stress. This would go against our goal of being a source of stress relief and productivity. Instead, we decided to utilize TheMovieDB’s API and suggest movies that are now in theaters (in a random order) for our users to watch to help them relieve stress.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned about and practiced implementing MERN stack and are excited to continue using it in other web application projects. For some of us, this was also the first hackathon/project! And, we’re especially proud of the team for helping each other out and making this weekend fun, insightful, and memorable!

What we learned

We learned about MERN stack web development with MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js. We also learned about performing requests from a web API.

What’s next for Stay At Home:

Stay At Home is currently in its early stages, moving forward this application has a lot of potential. Not only does it encourage people to stay at home during the pandemic, but it also offers them strategies to relax which are practical well beyond the pandemic. Due to the way the framework is set up, it’s highly convenient to continue to add more functions to the application. We will continue to update the app as we move forward with new features that continue to entertain the users.

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