Uplift

Inspiration

After seeing many of my teacher's futile attempts in connecting our school further and promoting positivity among classmates, I wanted to develop a seamless approach towards empowerment and spreading positivity among high school students.

What it does

Uplift is a social media platform that is geared towards high school students while providing a unique proposition of sharing compliments and highlighting positives among classmates and peers in a seamless and unobnoxious manner. Uplift provides a seamless and simple interface that encourages students to share one positive experience with a classmate they have had every day. After sharing a simple compliment, students can see a gamified daily leaderboard which is based on the number of compliments that you share and receive. This leaderboard is influenced by positivity streaks, encouraging people to return daily and share positive experiences they had with their friends and classmates.

How we built it

The entire project was developed in a TypeScript monorepo, making it easier to add and scale in the future. Uplift's HTTP API was developed using Fastify, and it uses PostgreSQL for all data storage. The frontend prototype was developed using React, NextJS, TailwindCSS and Framer Motion. The entire project was designed, developed and demoed in under 24 hours during PantherHacks 2023. All source code is available in the linked monorepo!

Challenges I ran into

I found it relatively hard to complete the entire full-stack project by myself on time. My main challenge throughout the hackathon was tackling the provided time constraint and pushing as many features as possible while retaining the quality, seamlessness and user experience that is seen in the final product. Although I couldn't implement many of the features I wanted to, I'm glad that I didn't sacrifice on the quality and UX of the features that I did develop, because the UX is one of the most important factors for high-school targeted applications.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm really proud of working by myself to complete a prototype of the application in time. It was an enlightening experience to work under pressure and develop software that could be used in real-world scenarios after further development.

What's next for Uplift

With more fine-tuning, I hope to make the Uplift experience more seamless and well-defined; essentially providing a more clear value proposition with more brainstorming.

• Inviting friends via contacts
• Leaderboards between different schools (more competition)
• Custom prompts and highlight boards for people who are on top of the leaderboard

Built With

• fastify
• next
• node.js
• postgresql
• react
• tailwindcss
• typescript