TOUCH GRASS

How are we supposed to build community if you always on that dang phone!

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Inspiration

As Computer Science students, we are trained to believe that more connectivity equals more progress. But for a generation raised as "Users" in an attention economy, that progress has felt more like a "Blue Screen of Death" for our social lives.

What it does

Allows users input their interests and have a be able to see what 3rd spaces are in area for them based off different interests, distance, etc. It allows users to use a interactive map to get information on different 3rd spaces to build community and engage with other face to face instead of having to rely on electronic friendships.

How we built it

We hosted and distributed our project across 2 vercel servers with 1 running a react app that implements the google maps api for the dynamic map, and a second running a node.js REST api that handles business logic for fetching and doing CRUD operations on our PostgreSQL data base using supabase and supabase S3 for object storage (hosting images, and videos). These servers communicate over http request requests.

Challenges we ran into

Making sure that the google maps api was implemented in a efficient way, we had the maps api hanging due to a slow load times. Making sure we efficiently committing so the frontend can start testing api endpoints. As well as making sure data was validated correctly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making a hosted application in such a short time, we are very pleased that the app is able to be viewed currently and is easy for us to continue developing on it.

What we learned

How to effectively develop as a team on a very intricate project with a team with varying skill sets and strengths.

What's next for TOUCH GRASS

To continue to implement new features, such as allowing for users the create their own 3rd spaces so they can further promote in person engagements. As well as add efficient support for 3rd spaces nationally so people across the country can use our platform. I also think allowing people to RSVP to certain 3rd spaces so people can see who is coming to those 3rd spaces could also be cool as well.

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