TechConnect

A Platform that Connects Non-profits with Programmers for Social Good

Comment

Inspiration

Throughout our high school years, my team and I were heavily interested in volunteering and humanitarian aid. We joined several youth organizations to contribute our efforts, but we were never able to apply our strongest skill: computer science. We decided to do something about this issue to help computer scientists and engineers to be able to apply their skills and make a profound impact on our society. At the same time, non-profit organizations have trouble recruiting computer scientists to build their software mainly due to their low budgets, which makes it difficult for these charities to function and contribute to society. Thus, we decided to create TechConnect, a platform where computer science enthusiasts of any level can take on software development projects listed by the community organizations. While these freelancers can build their portfolio, the charities benefit by receiving tech support with little to no cost.

What it does

Our website helps match computer programming enthusiasts with non-profit organizations. More specifically, the webform accepts requests for technological aid from non-profits and posts them onto the platform. When programmers are interested in undertaking the project, they can directly apply towards the cause and our website helps match the pair together.

How we built it

We built this project using Javascript, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, and Firebase. We designed our website with HTML/CSS and Boostrap and implemented the databases using Javascript and Firebase. There were two databases in our program where we stored the non-profit organizations' and job applicants' information.

Challenges we ran into

When making this project, one of our struggles was designing a visually appealing and functional website. By using bootstrap and carefully designing the details, we were able to overcome this problem. The other issue we came across was implementing FireBase to store our inputted data. Since we were new to using FireBase, there were many methods and commands that we were not familiar with. However, through experimentation and self-study, as well as some general aid from the mentors, we were able to quickly gain grasp of the tool and implement it in our platform.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Dennis and I are really proud of learning and implementing Firebase for the first time. It was difficult at first, but there were very helpful mentors who guided us through the way.

What we learned

We learned how to call, store, retrieve values from Firebase, and developed a stronger understanding of the programming languages that we used to make this project. Overall, it was a great learning experience, especially as it was our first hackathon, and we are very proud that we were able to complete the program.

What's next for TechConnect

TechConnect Next time, we hope to use Firebase to collect all kinds of values. The information that we retrieved from our program were all strings, but we hope to be able to gather files, lists, and more. We also want to implement a cryptocurrency API to make the financial transaction process between the freelancers and organizations easier.

Share this project:

Updates