Inspiration
We both have friends who get into fierce basketball debates about players, many of them being misinformed. We wanted to create a convenient tool that allows users to quickly lookup players' stats.
What it does
Users search by name or by team and easily get access to a wide range of stats updated by the NBA.
How we built it
We used flutter for the front-end and chose NodeJS for the back-end. My partner Ash recommended flutter for the back-end as it seemed like a powerful language for mobile apps that gave us the freedom to control the smallest details of the page. We chose NodeJS for the back-end because of inertia: we simply had the most experience with it among the server-side frameworks we had at our disposal.
Challenges we ran into
So many. Firstly, neither of us was able to run the app on an emulator or an android phone. Until we figured that out, we lost quite a bit of time. Second, flutter was quite new to both of us, especially for me. We also had trouble integrating the API we were pulling into our program. It was not able to output what we wanted, and lack of experience with flutter did not help. Finally, even though we were able to retrieve the right data, we still had to drag it into tables and make it look nice.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We built a full-stack app with technologies we weren't comfortable with in less than 1 day. We're proud of our idea as we believe it actually serves as a useful app we both know people would download and use. Through all the issues we faced, we're also proud we just kept at it until things worked.
What we learned
We learned that creating huge mobile apps that do a lot of things are way more difficult to program than we thought. So many little pieces have to work together and doing that requires much more than we anticipated.
What's next for Actually Stats
We had a bunch of other ideas for features but we just didn't have enough time to complete them today. We hope to work through those features and soon launch the app on both iOS and the Google Playstore.
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