Text-Me-When-You-Reach

A web platform to remind your friends to notify you that they got home safe, to ensure that every late night has a good next day.

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Inspiration

How often has a friend said these words, "Text me when you reach?" but how often do you do so? This platform aims to make sure that you safely get to where you need to go a 100% of the time. We all need to feel safer when traveling alone, especially after-dark, and usually neglect/forget to let our loved ones know that we've reached our destination. We were inspired to create this hassle-free website to make this efficient for everyone!

What it does

As a Guardian, you can request your friend, i.e. the Traveller, for a text-me-when-you-reach request on the website. The Guardian will then receive an SMS to accept this request and they can fill in their destination and mode of transport. This will be used to calculate their ETA to their destination.

10 minutes after the estimated ETA, the Traveller will receive an SMS asking them to use the provided link to confirm if they've reached home and let their Guardian know.

Scenario 1 The Traveller clicks the link and confirms that they've reached! This automatically sends an SMS to their Guardian, letting them know that their Traveller has reached safely and they should call them up to check in.

That's great!

Scenario 2 If the Traveller does not respond within another 5 minutes, the Guardian is sent an SMS alerting them that their Traveller has not reached their destination and that they should immediately check on them. They can additionally be sent the last known GPS location if the Traveller allowed this to be shared.

We hope they can locate the Traveller at the earliest and make sure they reach their destination soon.

How we built it

Website Our front end is a simple clean design made using simple forms and Hokie colours (🎉) ! Tools: HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Backend Server We used Google Cloud for EVERYTHING! From hosting our website, to writing backend, serverless functions to trigger events, Google Cloud Free Trial credits came to our clutch!

Database Google Firestore for efficient and secure integration with Google Cloud

External APIs Twilio: Used to send curated, timely SMS to the Guardian and the Traveller Google Maps API: To calculate estimate ETA of the Traveller's journey

Challenges we ran into

  • Working with the limitations of Twilio (MLH code was unfortunately expired)
  • Trying to refine the scope of our project from our extensive list of brainstormed features to ensure we were able to develop the most necessary ones during the 24 hour hackathon period.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Learning and Setting up Google Cloud in under a day!
  • As a team of 2, we were quickly able to utilize our strengths and support each other during our moments of weakness (zero sleep in 24 hours can make one delirious!)

What we learned

  • How much potential there is for something to quickly go wrong!
  • In our research for the use case of this project, we learnt through articles, police notifications about how unsafe traveling alone can be.

What's next for Text-Me-When-You-Reach

We have our MVP ready! We have a lovely list of features that we would love to incorporate to take forward this project and eventually publish it to the world for real life use.

Our RoadMap

  • Allow a Guardian to make requests to multiple Travellers simultaneously
  • Improved Security by limiting requests per user, spam detection and also by authenticating users
  • Testing modules at every step (unit, integration testing)
  • Allowing requests to be made via SMS directly
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