Inspiration
Our team comprises of college students who struggle to maintain a healthy lifestyle with their busy schedules. Due to time constraints as well as not having the motiviation of someone to push them to try harder to keep a good lifestyle up, we found that an easy solution to this would be an application to help find gym buddies or dieting buddies to push you through keeping up with healthier choices.
What it does
This site main purpose was to be like a tinder for people trying to keep up with or start a healthy schedule involving exercising and dieting. You basically sign up for the site and give it info on you excercise and dieting schedule and/or goals. After this, it would show you people who are trying to do the same thing as you and give you a chance to communicate with them about becoming gym pals or each others diet watchers.
How we built it
Rishab worked on the back-end server written with Flask(a Python library) connected to a SQLite database.
Rahul,Thomas, and Ben were all being tutored by Rishab on front-end web development because this was their first hackathon and they were freshman with no experience in Web Development. They all worked on creating different front-end pages to practice what they learned. Rahul picked up on it the fastest and we ended up using his front-end page. They all worked on building the front-end experience using HTML5,CSS3, and Javascript. As well as editing images and logos for the pages.
Challenges we ran into
Working on the backend we ran into issues properly setting up user authentication alongside Flask, SQLite, and HTML/JS. We tried to implement openid logins, however documentation was a little unclear as to how to login with openids once the server is setup for authentication. We chose to put authentication on the back-burner and move on with the main features. We also had a variety of the issues implementing the front-end. This was Rahul's first hackathon, as well as first time doing web dev or using git. As such, Rishab took the opportunity to mentor Rahul,Thomas, and Ben in both git and some basic web dev as they are useful skills to have in their future as computer science majors.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are happy that we all learned a good amount of new things about web development. Although, we ended up with a rough product we're excited that we are ready to present a working concept of an idea that stemmed from a joke.
What we learned
We learned how to work as a coherent team even when the majority of the team is inexperienced and/or not knowledgeable about the plan in mind. We held together and kept pushing to make progress even when we felt there was no possible way we could have a final product ready for submission. We decided to focus on using the application as a learning experience instead of aiming to win a prize.
What's next for FitFinder
The next steps for FitFinder would be to implement proper user authorization, as well as distance filtering of the user "pool". We hope to have the website developed to meet our original plans so that we can further learn web dev while also developing a useful application.
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