Lifefind

Introducing Lifefind, the first app that helps college students find lost items. Make a post about your lost item along with descriptors and potential locations, and you will be alerted when found.

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Goal for this Hack

In this hackathon, my primary goal was to leverage the Github Student Development Pack. There are over 87 paid services that are completely free thanks to this awesome pack! In the end, I utilized:

  • namecheap for the .me domain name
  • digitalocean for deploying node server
  • github for source control
  • vscode for coding the application
  • ICONS8 for graphics and splashes
  • twilio for mail and sms notifications (sendgrid is an alternative)
  • mongodb for the database
  • iconscout for the icons

Inspiration

Numerous students lose items every day, and yet there is no organized platform for finding items. Some post on the university story and others post on the Instagram story hoping someone might have found it. Lifefind will be the first centralized platform reconnecting owners with their lost items.

What it does

Create and Read posts of lost items, filter by category (wallet, id, AirPods, etc) or see all lost items in your area. When your item is found, our automated servers will send you an email and sms notification of the location of your item. Additionally, a map view is available to view all lost items in close proximity to you. (Range is adjustable). If you find a lost item and it is not listed in the lost items, there is an additional option to report it. Items reported found are sent to a private database, only viewable by approved moderators so they can be manually cross-evaluated with lost items. If you post something with an identifier (student id card), and the

How we built it

Our SaaS is built on a modern frontend framework (Next 13). For the GeoLocation integration, I used Google Cloud Maps API and Places autocomplete. I also utilized Twilio (& SendGrid) communications API to communicate directly with the users. Finally, I used MongoDB for the database and Cloudinary for Image Hosting.

Challenges we ran into

Integration heck. Working with so many different API's interchangeably caused more issues than you can ever guess. Maps API was extremely buggy, and I utilized over 20 wrapper libraries, many of them causing even more errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UI is super sleek and modern! I am a big fan of the Design style.

What's next for Lifefind

I hope to refine and scale Lifefind to as many Campuses across the US as possible! Fortunately, our SaaS scales horizontally with ease. Our model is created so that different university spaces can establish without any manual adjustments. When a user creates a verified account with an unregistered university, our database automatically creates a new Cluster for them to exist in.

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