Inspiration
The truth is, we're hoarders. Every person on our team keeps things that we don't need and can't sell, namely old textbooks. We also enjoy receiving free things.
What it does
Our app allows regular people to post things to give away as well as find free stuff to get. No company promotions and nothing for sale.
How we built it
To build our iOS application, we utilized swift on Xcode. We also integrated firebase for backend development to post things in the app and retrieve those items on the database.
Challenges we ran into
First off, the idea generation was tough. We wanted to find something to work on that our entire team could relate to and was interested in building. After we realized that we wanted to help people post and get free stuff, it became an issue of time. Could we accomplish all that we would set out to before the 15:00 Sunday deadline? Finally, no one on our team was an expert at front end app development and therefore creating the user interface was a learning curve to overcome.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're immensely proud of our ability as a team to work on different aspects of the app separately, put them together and have a fully functioning application as a result that we can be proud of.
What we learned
We came into this hackathon with varying degrees of expertise in a few programming languages and while collaborating on the app, we found ourselves sharing our experiences and tips for working with Ruby, Python and Java. None of us were had real exposure to front-end development and design so we also learned quite a bit of the tools available and how to implement them over the course of our project. Also, a few of us did not realize how unpopular C++ was in the coding community, so that serves as another lesson as well.
What's next for Free4Me
We continue developing our app to remain as useful and efficient as possible; in the short-term, we will be looking to add in-app messaging and a bartering interface.
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