ConfessTX

IMPORTANT, ONLY RUN ON MOBILE DEVICE AS WEB APP, NOT MADE FOR COMPUTERS

Inspiration

Our teammate and dear friend Ashwin had expressed some concerns to us a while back on how he occasionally felt isolated and removed from the rest of his student body. Loneliness and impostor syndrome is a common feeling that many students face and as a consequence of this, they often struggle to express their emotions. We set out to develop ConfessTX as an outlet for students to be able to convey secrets and feelings they wouldn't otherwise have a platform to let out.

What it does

ConfessTX is a platform which enables UT students to express their confessions or thoughts and also view/connect with others confessions or thoughts as well.

How we built it

Technologies used included meteor.js, javascript, html, css, material-ui

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced was the learning curve. Our whole team was entirely new to almost all of the technologies implemented and it was very difficult having to learn and develop a project in a span of 18 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The largest accomplishment we're proud of is being able to succesfully learn and develop this project in such a short time span. We also were facing a lot of difficulty in regards to implementing the real-time functionality, but it is now almost instantaneous. When a user writes a confession from any mobile device, all other users on the web app will be updated at almost the exact time– with no reload, or any other buffer.

What we learned

The most significant thing learned through this experience was teamwork. This was all our first hackathon and it was a very unique and rich experience in the sense that it provided us with the opportunity to work in teams in pursuit of a common goals. This lends a hand to other lessons such as leadership, decision-making and collaboration.

What's next for ConfessTX

There are many directions we can take ConfessTX in, some possible ones being a counseling-based application or even just a way to form communities of people with similar ideologies. The first priority though, is to expand to other devices such as laptop/pc and improving the UI. There was pretty much no styling as the length of the project was very focused on learning and connecting back-end functionality.