Inspiration
As we continue to advance technologically in this day and age, human interaction already has significantly begun to deteriorate. A major issue we will all face at some point in our lives is a language barrier between another human being. We identified this as a significant problem, and wanted to do something about it. As we continued to solidify our solution, we realized how big of an impact we could actually make so we hit the ground running.
What it does
Swiftty is capable of being one's personal liaison, allowing communication with others who don't even speak the same language. It currently has full text message support, as well as the ability to send translated audio clips. All of this happens in a timely manner to keep a continuous flow to the conversation.
How we built it
Our platform is a cloud based Django solution. Our site currently allows two users to connect and communicate with each other. Each message or video clip a user sends is translated directly with the Google Translate API to the other user's native language before being displayed.
Challenges we ran into
Getting Django to run was the hardest challenge we faced. We spent a good portion of the night, as well as mentor David's time, trying to debug why Django refused to start up. Next on the list was constant Git issues throughout the night. At one point we had a git repo inside of another git repo, a gitception if you will, which the only solution we could come up with was creating a third, new repo and just pulling everything in together.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Getting Django to stop giving us errors
- Translating two forms of media
- Some of us learned Python from scratch
What we learned
Over the past 25 hours, we learned quite a lot about web applications. We all come from strong web and GUI design backgrounds, however none of us have used web frameworks such as Django or AngularJS. We each got a chance to get our foot wet in this area of design and came out learning about how and why you would use them, and even more about how not to use them.
What's next for Swiftty
Extending functionality of the platform would be our next course of action. We cut a lot of features we wanted to support such as a mobile app and real-time VoIP. We also would create a real login system with user profiles that could be customized with personal info and a profile picture. During this time, the UI would undergo many modifications to support these new features.
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