Inspiration
The LGBTQ+ community as a whole has faced many obstacles in the last few years. Our teammate Brendan has also faced many issues when sharing his experiences as a member of the gay community. He was unable to acquire support and gain access to a platform that can help him spread awareness about his community. Hence, we created Per/ception, a way to connect LGBTQ+ people and allies from across the globe in order to share their experiences and challenges to the people that need to hear them. There are over 10 million LGBTQ+ people, but many times, people in the LGBTQ+ community feel like no one understands what they are going through. By having a single platform connecting the LGBTQ+ community, people can transform their perspectives and become an ally. Ultimately, we believe that by listening to a diverse array of stories, you will enhance your global perspective.
What it does
Per/ception is a social media platform. Users can create public stories to share with the world, or private stories to document their own journey. Users can login and access various stories, customize their profile, view other user's profiles, and much more! The biggest feature in Per/ception is the public stories view, where users can read stories from all Per/ception users. Users have a dashboard of all of their stories, where they can create, view, edit, and delete stories–all in one page.
How we built it
We used many libraries including Node.js, Express.js, Google OAuth, Passport, and MongoDB. We used Node.js for the back-end and Express.js for specific server-side logic. Google OAuth is our main login function, so we spent a good amount of time learning how to use the Google Cloud API to create it. Passport also helped us with setting up authentication. We used HTML5 and CSS to create the front-end of our application and style it. Finally, we used MongoDB to store all the data collected and user sessions.
Challenges we ran into
Note: This is our first hackathon for most of us. The main challenge was coding in unfamiliar languages. For some of us it was our first time coding in JavaScript! Through perseverance and reading dense documentation, we were able to successfully create a functioning web application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are excited about our product and are proud of the many new technical skills we acquired throughout the hackathon.
What we learned
We learned a lot about Node.js, Express.js, Google OAuth, and MongoDB, but we hope to further our skills even more and create something even better next time! We also learned that coding in groups can be a blast!
What's next for Per/ception
We think that we can improve Per/ception in many different ways later on. We could create a follow/unfollow feature, custom feed, post/user search functionality, and sentiment analysis for comments on stories for content filtering. We could also add image and video embedding to diversify the content on Per/ception. Our team looks forward to continuing implementing new features for this awesome product!
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