We know that many people have their own problems and that having someone to talk to would mean the world to them. However, they avoid speaking about their feelings because of insecurity, anxiety, or fear, and instead, stay silent. This is why we wanted to provide a safe space for users to share their thoughts, advise others, and spread overall positivity. We wanted to create something that would allow users to speak out about their problems without fear of being judged or ridiculed.
Our application holds various categories for certain problems that many might face. Things such as stress from work, school, and family, or advice on relationships, health, and general problems are things worth talking about. Therefore, we let the users choose which category they want to talk about and write an anonymous post which is sent up in a flying lantern. Other users can click on these flying lanterns in order to read and interact with them, even being able to reply and have a heartfelt conversation. However, a positive environment is what we strive for and a platform like this is almost guaranteed some sort of negativity when speaking about their problems. This is why we decided to implement Google Cloud's Natural Language API to moderate and make sure our users have a peaceful and judgment-free experience.
We built our web app using a combination of frontend and backend technologies. For the front end, we used Nextjs, a React framework that allows us to create dynamic and interactive web pages. We also used TailwindCSS, a utility-first CSS framework that helps us style our components with ease. To make our UI more appealing and consistent, we used DaisyUI, a plugin for TailwindCSS that provides ready-made components and themes. Finally, we used Framer Motion, a library for React that enables us to create the animations in our application.
For the backend, we used the Flask web framework that handles our server-side logic and routing. We also integrated Firebase with our Nextjs app to handle user authentication and store post and user data with their Firestore database.
We leveraged the power of Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) Sentiment Analysis API to identify and prevent negative or toxic content from being posted by users. We also used the GCP Entities API to protect the privacy of our users by detecting sensitive information such as names, locations, and contact details.
Throughout the hackathon, we ran into many roadblocks that we had to face as a team. This was two of our team members' first hackathon, so this hackathon was prone to lead to challenges. Things such as working as a team with Git, its divergent branches, and the merging process, caused many headaches. This was our team's first full-stack project, with a framework we didn't know too well, and libraries that were new to most of us. However, even with all the issues that we faced, we still managed to achieve what we initially envisioned and overcame all those challenges through commitment and motivation.
This hackathon has led to many accomplishments that we are proud of achieving. First of all, our team managed to communicate and work together effectively, past all the challenges. This was an invaluable experience and the fact that we managed to reach a point in our project that we are proud of makes us unbelievably happy. Most of our team are first-time hackers, but still being able to contribute to the project and at the same time, learn new frameworks and technologies for said project, makes us unbelievably proud. This hackathon has been a rollercoaster of emotions but our team completely agreed that it was worth it and we had so much fun.
Through this hackathon, we learned the benefits and struggles of teamwork. A majority of our team had never worked on a large-scale project with others, and this hackathon served as an experience for all of them. The objective of this project was to build a platform that would encourage positivity, and the process of merging different components to complete it was a valuable learning experience for all members of the team. During the hackathon, we learned various technologies and how to combine them in order to create something we were proud of. Some of the technologies we learned were Google Cloud’s APIS, Firebase, Flask, and React, and how to integrate databases with both the front end and back end. The accumulation of these skills has made all of our team better developers and programmers overall.
Even though we have built and accomplished so much in the 48 hours given to hack, we believe that we have not reached the full potential of InsightfulLanterns. We plan to continue improving and adding to our application and continue spreading positivity. This project means a lot to us and we plan to share this with others in order to see their thoughts and gain feedback. We learned a lot making this project and can only be grateful for having this opportunity. Hopefully, one day we will manage to achieve the big vision we had when imagining the idea and at the same time, learn as we go.