Small Details

An app that's simple and easy to use, as well as practical. It's difficult to make time for the small details in life sometimes, so we made an app that does it for you.

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Inspiration

One of our team members worked with a mobile detailing company, as a detailer. He noticed that when COVID hit, contrary to intuition, sales began to plummet. The inspiration for this idea is geared toward the reconnection of the industry and the local community.

Additionally, another one of our team members has seen many small mobile businesses run by minorities including the one his Father operates. Many of these business owners rely on word of mouth because of less accessibility to forms of advertising and connections to customers due to things such as language barriers. This sparked an interest in creating an app that is easy to use and that helps facilitate more connections between businesses and potential customers.

What it does

Small Details is an app that connects the user to local small businesses around them, based on their location, and the service radius of the vendors themselves. Currently, the app is geared towards mobile car detailing, but could easily be used for other kinds of small businesses.

How we built it

Small Details was built with a modified MERN stack. We used MongoDB for the database, Express for the API, Flutter for the front end instead of React, and Node for the back end.

Challenges we ran into

There were several challenges that we ran in the process of creating this app, none the least of which was a lack of experience. This is the entire team's first hackathon, so there was a bit of a learning curve when it came to working in this kind of environment. Most of us were unfamiliar with Flutter, Dart, and Node, so we had to learn as we went and help each other out with our own experience levels. In addition to learning on the fly for the development languages, we also had to set up the development environment on site, which caused several issues as setup typically causes problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we managed to get the geolocation of the user to compare with vendors, as well as the mathematics used in the processes of doing so. We are also pleased with the way that the UI turned out, using Flutter's built-widgets, as well as some of our own.

What we learned

We learned to install the development environment before-hand, as that was a large issue. We also feel that we learned a lot about the respective tech involved. Those of us that were new to Flutter learned Dart, and those of us that were new to Express learned a lot about JavaScript. A couple of us were also very new to project development, so the creation of a custom API that interacts with a database was an entirely new experience

What's next for Small Details

There are several things that can be added Small Details. We could add more language options to assist people that do not speak English as a native language. It could also have more filters than just the distance, for example, filters by price, or by specific location. It could also be expanded to encompass more small businesses, strengthening the community further, and giving power to those in it.

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