TextIn

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Inspiration

At recruitment and other events where attendance is tracked, people often have to wait in line to put their name on a list or enter their name on a spreadsheet. These antiquated methods are inconvenient both for event planners and attendees. Wouldn't it be simpler if everyone could sign at the same time using technology readily available?

What it does

TextIn is a simple attendance tracking application that lets people sign in quickly and conveniently. Using SMS messages rather than an application, it allows people to register their attendance without the hassle of signing up for an account without sacrificing analytics for the event planners. It also allows event planners to keep track of their events and analyze attendance.

How we built it

We used AngularJS, ExpressJS, NodeJS, MySQL as our stack. We also used the Socket.io and Twilio API's. We used cloud servers to host it and a Domain.com domain. We used github for version control.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up two way data streams and live updating was extremely challenging. We looked at several websocket possibilities before settling on socket.io.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the SMS responsiveness and the live updates of our two way streams.

What we learned

We learned a lot about API's and a lot more about our own capabilities. We did think we would reach this point in the application when we listed all the remaining tasks we had to do mid way through but we ended with all the tasks completed.