Wander

Inspiration

We wanted to dedicate an application where users can create and view posts that other users have traveled too and their personal experiences . We know finding areas to visit when ever you travel could be difficult and so having a platform where you can view and save places other people personally recommend could help give them a richer exerpeince when they travel there themselves. The idea of using decentralized tech felt perfect for helping travelers share authentic, local tips and hidden gems that are always available and can’t be removed.

What it does

Wander is a travel app that lets people create and explore custom travel guides, local tips, and hidden spots. It uses Pinata and IPFS to store travel content in a decentralized manner, ensuring users posts are secure and available for other users that are viewing their content. Our main feature is ensuring that creating posts is a simple process, allowing users to add a title, description, files they wanna add, and location tags.

How we built it

We built the app using React for the user interface and googlemaps for the map interface. Pinata usage of IPFS handles storing a users media in a secure manner and ensuring our platforms media content doesn't have a single point of failure . We leveraged express.js as our backend and took it as an oppurtunity to gain a better understand of express. We used MongoDB as our backend due to it's simplicity and scalability.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble getting IPFS and Pinata to work smoothly at first, especially with file uploads and storage. Setting up our MongoDB database also was a new challenge for all of us because it was our first time ever using MongoDB ever. We learned the basic syntx and as our project progressed we gained more experience with the language and were able to integrate into our platform faster and more efficently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we successfully created a decentralized app where people can share travel experiences that are always accessible. Not only in our success of the project but in our teams ability to learn new technology within a short time span and added new value onto ourselves as engineers.

What we learned

We learned how to work with decentralized storage tools like IPFS and Pinata and how to integrate them with a web app. We also learned a lot about making interactive maps and how to optimize data flow to make everything run smoothly.

What's next for Wander

Next, we want to improve the design and add more social features, like letting users follow each other and share full travel guides. Users in the future will be able to bookmark locations that other people shared and view them on their profile page. We would also like to add a profile for each individual user providing a more diverse user experience.