Inspiration
When the theme was just released, l started questioning myself what is the thing that technology brings people together. The first idea that jumped to my mind is social media, people can chat and share their thoughts on those platforms which will ultimately, bring people together! In some software such as Instagram, people can make a post that shares their thoughts about a day in life with others worldwide, inspiring us to project SWAP(Share With Another Person).
What it does
SWAP is an application that allows people to connect, people can make posts on their just like how they did it on Instagram. What is the difference between SWAP and Instagram? Unlike Instagram packed with diverse functionalities, SWAP only focuses on sharing stories, people can simply connect by sharing their stories.
How we built it
The entire project is based on Python. The front end is built upon the Python GUI library called Kivy and then uses Amazon S3 to access the database that contains both the user information and the stories.
Challenges we ran into
One of the first major challenges we ran into was choosing the language. Initially, we believed that using HTML, CSS and JavaScript would be the best solution to write SWAP. But the problem is since we are all first-year students, none of us have any experience in any of the languages above. Therefore we chose Python as we are more familiar with this language, but in exchange, it takes a lot of effort(The .kv file has 1k+ lines, there is no hint in error and the debugging process is a nightmare)
The second major challenge is the communication with the Amazon Web Service. Somehow we always cannot establish a connection with Amazon S3, and it is very frustrating that every time we run the program, the program is halted. This is one of the basic parts, and if we don’t have a connection established, we cannot access the database and nothing can be further continued.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The way we approach this project is we completely separate the backend and the frontend, and we both work on the same page. For example, when l am working on the login page front end, so is the my other teammate working simultaneously on the back end. And the accomplishments we have when the page is successfully combined together is perfect!!! And we are proud of what we have achieved in 24 hours for this project.
What we learned
In terms of technical skills, we gained valuable experience in cloud database storage as well as some graphical user interface tools and utilised Git, which is valuable in the future.
On the social side, we learned how to effectively communicate with one another, when communicating the progress on the assigned task, we learned how effective communication can increase the efficiency of work, and develop a software in better quality.
What's next for SWAP
So far SWAP has the basic functionality that allows user to create an account and log in with the account, have posts to view and create a post on their own. There can be further functionalities we can add to SWAP, for example, when a user uploads a post of their own, there is a chance that he can see the post he made. Further to this, the user cannot actively see and delete the post he made, those functions are also considered important to the software, but due to time constrain we could not implement such a feature. However, these features will be added in the future.
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