1by1

We are aiming to primarily assist small and new businesses in their mission to start or maintain an online presence, by making it quick and easy to find new things to post.

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Inspiration

We've noticed that many small and newer business owners have trouble reaching a wider audience with their products and we wanted to build a platform to provide relevant images to bolster their online presence and allow them to reach a broader demographic with their products.

What it does

Our application takes leverages pre-existing image API"s and takes Instagram bio's and parses them for keywords and sends relevant images relating to their keyword. They can post these images on social media to grow their portfolio

How we built it

We used a front end comprised of React.js and styled with TailwindCSS. Our backend is formed of Express.js and Node.js for building data endpoints that would query our MongoDB database for relevant keywords and returning image API search queries.

Challenges we ran into

We originally used CockroachDB for our database storing our queried data. The cloud cluster setup kept crashing and took 6 hours to repair and get it linked from our machines to our cluster. We figured out we couldn't pull data from CockroachDB's cloud cluster through Express.js and Node.js so we had to quickly pivot to MongoDB which was a NoSQL database. Learning a new database was a massive hassle as we had little time to configure the database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, tackling this project was a huge undertaking, both educationally and implementation-wise. We learned a lot about full-stack development in a very short amount of time while having little to no experience at first. We're proud to have created a working project as well as having cultivated a greater understanding of building web applications and how various components like the backend and database interact.

While some of our teammates had experience in machine learning, this particular niche area of implementation was brand new to all of us, but we handled ourselves well!

What we learned

We learned a lot more about building full-stack apps. We dove into the specifics of how the front works on the client-side and how the backend logic pairs with the front end to process queries and links to our database. Overall, we had a great time learning and experimenting, and we plan to build more applications and grow our knowledge.

What's next for 1by1

We plan on adding more image API's like Unsplash to provide a larger variety of content as well as adding possible generation of Instagram post captions.

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