DragonShare

Landing Page
Login Page
New User Registration page
Form page

Inspiration

Our main inspiration came from our peers talking about how cab fares are often unreasonably high. We wanted to make something that gave Dragons an option to ride to places at affordable rates while meeting each other.

What it does

Through DragonShare, one can post requests for a companion in a ride. Users can register using their Drexel emails. They can post requests with info such as starting point, final destination, contact info and if they have a pet or child with them. Based on the posts, the users can contact the original poster and partner up to go for a ride. Not only will this help the user reduce the cost but also give them the chance to meet new people and ride safely.

How we built it

We split the team up into frontend and backend teams, with Moody in the back and Siddhanth, Srija, and Dishika working on the front. The backend is a Flask server that interfaces with a MongoDB Atlas instance. We used MongoEngine as the ORM to facilitate interactions with the database. The frontend is HTML and CSS with many portions written with Bootstrap and others with plain CSS. The HTML is all rendered server-side with the Jinja templating engine. We used message flashing to display messages from the server to the HTML. The website is reverse-proxied with Nginx and hosted on a DigitalOcean server. We're using Gunicorn as the gateway interface into the app.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge we ran into was to make the project in the limited amount of time given to us. Coming up with an idea and implementing it successfully within 24 hours was a big issue but we faced the challenge head-on. Learning new skills and implementing them was also a challenge, but we believe that we learnt a lot through that. Other than that, we had some bugs and issues here but we eventually worked hard and got through it together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Success in hosting the website on a server 2) Being able to design a logo for the website 3) Being able to connect a database 4) Completing our MVP in a such short time

What we learned

This was our first experience hosting a website. During this hackathon, we learned how to host a server. Additionally, we learned how to use MongoDB, JavaScript, and Flask as only one of us had prior experience with all of the above.

What's next for DragonShare

We have plans to expand this project and add more features to it like a sorting feature for the posts, a report option for posts that are deemed inappropriate, a reply feature to the posts, etc. We plan on making this website a place for all Dragons to access cheaper rides in a practical way while making new connections with people. We also plan on adding an internet calling feature so that the users can connect with each other without revealing their phone numbers.