Inspiration
With the recent tragedies of the California wildfires, we realized that many people did not have any way to immediately notify their families in the case of such emergencies. Sure, there's speed dial, but calling each individual loved one is time consuming - time that you might not have much left of. We decided that there should be a way to reach your beloved faster, whether it's to put them at ease that you are safe, let them know of nearby dangers, or ask them for help when you're in trouble. So we devised a plan. . .
What it does
EmergenSpeed allows you to input your emergency contact information. Then, with the push of a button, the app will notify all of your emergency contacts with the message YOU want. The app provides built in suggestions, but also allows you to customize a personalized message, already prepared for when you need to send a quick text to multiple people but don't have the time to individually notify everyone.
How we built it
We developed this app with development speed in mind. Since this is only a 24 hour hackathon, we had to run and test extremely quickly and debug easily. It was decided that we'd develop a hybrid mobile app using standard web technologies (HTML/CSS, and JS) and then use Apache Cordova to wrap our web app. The main functionality of the code would be written in Javascript and use the Twilio API to send SMS messages. Our entire interface was built with basic web technologies.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest hurdle was only having 24 hours to work on this. The most important takeaway from hackathons should not be the prizes, it should be learning. In 24 hours, it's difficult to teach everyone and get everyone on the same page and make significant progress on the projects at the same time. Furthermore, utilizing the Twilio API was difficult due to the lack of documentation for Javascript. There was little documentation for Node.JS but that's a technology we weren't willing to learn in the time left.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We've learned technologies that we could incorporate in future projects and by learning these now, we could speed up our initial development and allow us to develop more features before the end of the hackathon.
What I learned
We've made significant strides in our understanding of web technologies to the point where we started from knowing absolutely nothing to understanding core foundations of these technologies and gaining the ability to read the documentation ourselves to further our knowledge without external assistance.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.