truConnect

Inspiration

The inspiration behind truConnect is the power of support from a community in a time where the world is so isolated. truConnect allows a person to receive positive messages from the people around them who mean the most, at the times they need it the most. Ultimately, in a time where most are working from home, truConnect allows people to still feel the presence of their friends around them.

The most common complaint people have when working or learning from home, is that they feel isolated. The rapid development of social media should be making people more connected, but it is sometimes difficult to only see your friends’ highlight reel. truConnect aims to help people communicate on a less overwhelming and more personal level through a “pen-pal” like messaging system.

What it does

truConnect connects users by doing away with a massive notification system, and scheduling notifications for a certain time of day. The idea is that a user can choose to receive these intentional, supportive messages from loved ones at the beginning of the day or during a break so they aren’t thinking about all of their work while hearing from their friends; this also ensures that the program doesn’t just become another platform that a user has to respond on. Friends write messages to their friends in two categories: Encouragement/Support and Inspiration/Motivation. When a user receives a notification at the appointed time, they can choose which category they want to hear from. Once they pick a category, a personalized message from one of their friends appears on their screen.

truConnect allows a user to receive either an inspirational or supportive message from their group of friends at a desired time of day chosen by the user. All they have to do is create an account to be added to the database, and choose to receive a message. This program also allows the user to pay it forward and send words of encouragement to their friend group as well. Ultimately, it creates a way for users to not only receive positive messages but give them back to their community.

How I built it

Our team started building this application using a C++ framework. We first established a “sign-in function” and a “create account” function to either establish a user object or check an existing user object against a database. After crafting sample data to pull from, we created a menu that the user would see upon sign-in that contained three options: view inspirational messages, view encouraging messages, or send a message.

From here, we created two separate .h files to create and store both inspirational and encouraging messages. The “main” file references these files in order to read messages back to the user.

To create a message, we created a function called, “writeMessage”. This function prompts the user to pick a category and adds the message that they write to the database.

Challenges I ran into

2/3 of our team members were very new to C++, so it was difficult to understand and comprehend how .h and .cpp files are used in conjunction with one another. However, we were able to figure it out and create many different objects through .h files and implement them through our .cpp files.

Additionally, we struggled at the beginning to figure out how we could build an app without any user data to work with, as our collective knowledge was mainly in front-end development. To solve this problem, we created sample data through a .csv file. Our program can grab data from this file and implement it into the code that we wrote.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Everyone on our team had never attended a hackathon before, so we are proud that we were able to write a program that works and with further development could serve real purpose. We had all only written simple programs for class before, so we got to learn about other aspects of an application that aren’t simply how the code is written (i.e. how the files need to be organized, what else needs to be implemented in order to have a database of real data, using GitHub).

What I learned

One of the main things our team learned was how to create .h files and implement them into .cpp files. At one point, we had a lot of duplicate variables because we had declared them in multiple files. This, of course, was causing many errors throughout our program. After going back and only defining the variables in the .h files, we were able to successfully create objects and reference them in the main. Additionally, we were able to read data from a .csv file and print it out to the user. This is something that we had never done outside of class, and it made it abundantly clear that in the development life cycle, having template data to work with is necessary in order to test your program.

What's next for truConnect

If our project were to be further developed, there are some features that would still need to be added. -friend system→ this would help the program know what pool of users it had to grab messages from. We would have to create a function that links two users together; this would likely have to be a key system. -timing→ In order for the messages not to be dumped on the user all at once, we would need to implement a system that identifies that the user has a message in a category from another user, and shows it to the user at the receiving user’s appointed time. -GUI → In order for the program to become a functional application, we would need to create a GUI so that users on all platforms could have a pleasant user experience.

Built With

• c++
• clion
• csv
• excel
• github
• visual-studio