BunchNotes

A lightweight note-sharing app which allows students to connect with students at their college to publish and use existing class notes for free.

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Inspiration

We decided that this would be a good idea since existing free-resource note sharing apps are not incredibly popular or widely used.

What it does

The app allows you to post your own notes, which it will convert and store as PDFs. You then receive 2 bricks (a form of virtual currency) which you can use to view other people's notes, at a cost of 1 brick per view. You can also leave a rating on another post, and getting a 4 or 5 star rating on your post grants you another free brick. Another feature is the ability to search by School, Subject, and Code, which allows you to be very specific in which notes you want to see. You can also search by user-formulated tags.

How we built it

The backend of the project is in Python, using the FastAPI library to host API endpoints. The frontend is written in React and is accessible through bunchnotes.com, our own domain. We connected it all together using PostgreSQL, which contains all of our header data for files, users, classes, schools, etc.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the SQL queries especially on many-many tables were very difficult to set up. We also ran into trouble combining the frontend and the backend in the hosted server. Since we have the goal of translating this product into a worldwide project, we involved a lot of abstractions that took up a lot of time in the design process but will prove useful in further development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UI for our project is very intuitive and doesn't have to be over-functional to fulfill its purpose. We were also happy that we were able to come up with and put out such a useful project in the small time frame.

What we learned

There were a lot of things we learned from at this hackathon, but one major trend was to not overwork yourself on one project. If you're working on one thing for a while, and it's really not working, it's better to either see if a friend can help you with it or just put it away for a while and come back to it.

What's next for BunchNotes

A global launch! We hope to be able to promote this as a multi-university project which could pick up users all around. Obviously this means a lot of promotion and polishing, but we have the commitment to make this project a reality.

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