Circle Work | Devpost

Inspiration

Do you ever struggle to get work done? Yeah, so does everyone. With no one to hold you accountable it's hard to motivate yourself to get tasks done. We created Circle Space as a platform to help externally motivate you to get stuff done.

What it does

When you Register for Circle Space you join a circle of people just like you who are trying to motivate you to be the best you can be. You can either join your friends in a pre-existing circle or create your own and invite your friends to join your self-improvement journey. When you sign up you lend us a $5 motivator fee, if you get all your tasks completed and approved by at least half of your circle then we send that money right back to you at the end of the month. If you didn't quite finish all your tasks this month don't worry, we'll still send you back part of your motivator fee relative to how many of your tasks you finished and the rest gets put into a charity donation pool. At the end of the month the circle with the highest task completion rate gets to select one of our pre-approved charities to send the charity donation pool to. When logged in you’ll be able to see your circle's activity feed where you can see your other circle member’s public tasks and verify for us that they really did complete the task for an extra layer of accountability. When you’re ready to get productive all you need to do is start creating tasks for yourself. Each task has its own specifications on what it is and when it’s due, you can pick whether it's public or private so you can still maintain some privacy when needed while also being able to share your progress with your circle. Once you’ve completed your task you can

How we built it

First as a team we planned out all of our api requests and database schema so that we all understood what needed to happen and where. We started implementing by creating a custom Java HTTP API to handle all of our data transfer between the front and back end. As we worked on creating our generic handler and utility methods another one of our teammates created a PostgreSQL database using the schema that we had already planned out. Once the database was set up and the base of the API and helper methods were created we worked as a team to complete all of the API requests so that we could begin implementing the front end that our designer teammate created. We used ReactJS functional components to craft our front end to best cater to whatever device you would want to use Circle Space on. We then implemented a braintree dropin to process all of our payments in the front end and send them back to a payment processor in our api to allow for secure and fast payments.

Challenges we ran into

As we started trying to implement our custom API we realized that we were going to need more helper methods than we had created so we had to pause as a team and focus an hour or so on creating a decoupled prepared statement handler to exponentially speed up the development of our API handler classes. Another challenge that we ran into was running out of time, since we had so much functionality planned for Circle Space it was difficult to implement in just 21 hours to be completed before the 9:30am first submission deadline. Another issue of ours was inconsistent planning. In a few areas we had planned what was needed but forgot to reflect that on our api requests and responses document so the functionality had to be added much later when we realized that we had forgotten.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re extremely proud of our custom java API, it took quite a while to get it to work as we wanted but it was a very worthwhile time investment because it makes Circle Space a near completely custom task completion solution. We’re also very proud of our 500 meter row even if it did cause an asthma attack for one of our teammate(he is okay don't worry)

What we learned

Only one of our group mates had experience with Java APIs and only 2 of us had any experience with web development at all. Because of this, this whole hackathon was a learning experience for how to make a full stack website and how data travels between a database, api, and all the way to what a user sees and interacts with. One of our group mates with absolutely no experience with any form of full stack development actually took on the challenge of creating and implementing our database schema and helped create many of our api requests in his first ever hackathon.

What's next for Circle Work

Next up for Circle work is users! Our platform is ready for users to join in and start getting involved in a circle. Since Circle Work is partially a community platform, we rely on users bringing in their friends, co-workers, or anyone who wants to get stuff done to help verify and contribute to our community.