StoryTime

Inspiration

As kids we used to have time to read. We got lost in books enjoying the story of our favourite characters whenever we could. As we got older our reading time seems to have slipped away ... but our mindless social media scrolling has increased. What if we returned to reading? Even just 5 minutes a day? StoryTime gives us back our time to read.

What it does

StoryTime asks you to answer a simple question: How much time do you have right now? You can effortlessly select a value between 1-9 minutes and instantly read a hand-picked story or news article straight from our servers. Like the stories you want to see more of and dislike the ones you don't. StoryTime makes it easy to start reading again and put the dull social media scroll behind us. One short story at a time.

How we built it

We built StoryTime mainly in React-Native to take advantage of a singular, cross-platform code base. We also designed a back end system to interface with our app that allows us to keep our stories relevant and provide users a new story every time they open the app.

Challenges we ran into

One of our computers ran out of storage and it became extremely difficult to update the software to the necessary version. Also, none of us had any back end experience and it was a very large challenge to get the back end infrastructure in a state where it could communicate with the app. This would eventually prove too difficult to do for now and will be completed at a later date. Fortunately, the front-end code is already present to work seamlessly with the back-end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having a product to present. We are also extremely proud of the progress we made on learning entirely new things like back-end development. As it was the first hackathon for two of us, we are very happy with the result.

What we learned

We learned how to create a back-end database, we learned the React-Native app development process, we learned about the best method to stack cups, we learned about how many hours (or lack thereof) of sleep we can operate on, and most importantly we learned that no challenge is too difficult to attempt.

What's next for StoryTime

StoryTime's next step is adding more news articles and stories to the database. Fully implementing the back-end infrastructure would make this extremely simple. Other improvements could include creating an algorithm to curate stories and articles for each user. We also would be interested in adding more features like a push-to-search dictionary. Perhaps a statistics panel could be added to give people data on how much time they spend reading.

Built With

• javascript
• mongodb
• mspaint3d
• node.js
• npm
• react-native
• yarn