Inspiration
We were inspired by the JPMorgan Chase and Co. challenge of the hackathon. After hearing the challenge, we could immediately come up with ideas to promote entrepreneurship and business to female and underrepresented businesses and we used those to create a mobile app. There seems to be a shortage of apps like these which focus on women and minority representation in the business world, where they can support and meet each other to form connections and advance their businesses. LinkedIn was also an inspiration to us for our app.
What it does
This app provides small entrepreneurs in business opportunities to meet others in the same field. They can do so by hosting and attending events (there is a page for viewing events near you), posting and sharing valuable information and advice (there is an option for app-users to make posts, like them, and comment on them), directly messaging other apps- users (similar to a messaging app) and managing personal aims and data to grow their business. To do this, they will first have to create an account, and the option of signing in with LinkedIn is also available. We hope to create a supportive and inclusive community of women in business with this app.
How we built it
Since 3 of the 4 members of this team are non-CS majors, we decided to use an online app creator at honeycode.com. This is because we wanted to implement all the desired features of the app in a short amount of time, as well as have everyone contribute to the content of our app. (We did originally plan to code the whole app, and some of the code we planned to use is in particular branches in GitHub.) We tried to focus more on how our app would look to the users as UI is an important aspect of app development.
Challenges we ran into
The first challenge we ran into was that 3 of the 4 team members were not CS majors, so making an app turned out to be more difficult than expected. Also, the CS major did not know much about building apps. Another challenge we faced was having not much time to develop an app, so we decided to work on the UI using honeycode.com. This project was created during a difficult time for all of us but we worked together and worked hard to the best of our abilities.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of picking a challenge we want to work on relatively early in the hackathon. This enabled us to focus more on implementing it. We managed our time well and every member put in their fair share of work in making the app. We're also proud of ourselves for coming up with a great idea for all members to be able to contribute effectively by dividing up the tasks early on.
What we learned
We learned that hackathons are not just about coding. We can contribute to challenges in other ways, and the most important thing is the idea, not its implementation in code. We definitely learned to work more effectively as a team, as well as how to make effective UI designs using honeycode.com.
What's next for Divergent
The next step for our app is to make a website for it as well. Along with that, making groups with specific users of the app, including more media in posts and events, including a calendar with all the events, and making private events are some things to work on in the future. It is also a good idea for my team to learn how to build an app so that we can actually implement it and so it can be used by people around the world. Also, we will update our app to be able to sync its data to our personal phones.
We want to be the change, We want to create the change. This is Divergent.
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