GoalsOps

New year resolutions app ;)

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Inspiration

Resolutions are common on occasion of new year. Everyone resolves to accomplish certain goal in a new year. Making resolutions are easy but working hard and putting continuous efforts to achieve the goals are the real nuts to crack. Beginnings are always easy compared to the journey. People tend to forget or ignore the goals they had set with so much of enthusiasm on the 1st day of year. Moreover its not only about accomplishing the goal, its also about achieving it in limited amount of time. So its obviously difficult to achieve them. The idea of helping out people in achieving the goals inspired us to build the GoalsOps app.

What it does

GoalsOps is a user friendly android application that lets us store all our new year resolutions on one place. We can add a title and description to our resolutions and also set a deadline if our resolution aims to achieving or learning a skill. The user will then get a series of notifications before the deadline which can be customized in the app, so that the user doesn't forget about them. Once we accomplish our goal, we can even mark our resolutions as done and the app will stop notifying us about it.

How we built it

GoalsOps is an android application built using Material UI and android framework. All the resolutions created by the user will be saved in the internal storage and that will ensure user privacy. gson, a third party API is being used to parse all the resolution objects into JSON format so it is convenient to store in internal storage using Shared Preferences. The whole project is saved in git commits and are uploaded to GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

Shubham - With no prior experience of participating in hackathon, everything right from thinking about an idea to write-ups was a challenge. Moreover being a beginner in android development , the implementation of idea into a working app was further a challenge. On top of everything, completing all tasks in stipulated time, that too after starting very late made things further difficult.

Venu Sai - First of all, it was difficult to think about the functionality of the app that is to be implemented as the theme "New Year" is very vast. Even after gathering the ideas for the app, it was very difficult to design a prototype, start building and complete the whole project in just few hours. The real milestones have started when we started coding the application. My teammate Shubham had very little knowledge and experience in android development. Sharing my knowledge and resources with him, providing coaching when required and still completing the project on time was my greatest challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Managing time was one the greatest accomplishments we both had. Right from brainstorming the ideas for the project till making the demo video, we had only 48 hours. On top of that we started the work very late (almost 21 hours later). Gathering ideas, designing prototype, building the actual application and making a demo video all within 24 hours is too difficult but we made it possible. Not only time management but I (Venu) also taught my teammate about the APIs used, provided coaching wherever necessary and guided throughout the project. This helped me develop my teaching and leadership skills.

What we learned

Working for our project helped us sharpen our time management, team working, leadership and teaching skills. There is definitely a lot that we learned in these 48 hours. Shubham learnt how to get started with various android apps, how the android lifecycle works, different workflows, building various UI components and also use different APIs and the list goes on. Even though I (Venu) was experienced with android app development, I faced issues integrating the Twilio API. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to implement it but I got so much exposure about the tool. Everything was easy.. or at least I thought it was XD. But building an entire project within a day is a skill and I'm sure I made good progress in acquiring that.

What's next for GoalsOps

Integrating the application with Twilio API was not possible in the given span of time. So that is my prior goal for the project. The application should be able to get its data from whatsapp and add the details. There are certain UI functionalities in the app that would enhance user experience like animations and other graphic effects. Integrating the application with good quality graphics and logos wasn't possible in a very short time. But, we would definitely work for the same even after the submission for the hackathon.

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