Fast Breaks

Basketball-themed productivity tool based on the Pomodoro Method! It's a time management strategy where you start a 25 minute timer when working, and when it goes off you take a 4-5 minute break

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Inspiration

Initially, I wanted to create a useful app that someone who played basketball could use frequently, but we were struggling to come up with an idea that didn't already exist. After spending half an hour reading basketball puns online, I came across one pun that stuck out to me, and the idea for Fast Breaks was born. Upon doing more research, I found what seemed to be a significant lack of Pomodoro-related websites that were fun, and thought that would be the perfect gap to fill. As someone who struggles to stay focused, I have already implemented many productivity and organizational tools into my life, and am always looking for more!

What it does

Fast Breaks (fastbreaks.tech) is a fun basketball-themed website that helps users employ the Pomodoro Technique to increase productivity, and reduce the work/school-related stress and anxiety that has become exceedingly prevalent in today's hectic world. The main functionality of Fast Breaks is it's creative and user-friendly UI, with 3 user-controlled Pomodoro timers with progress bars and an interactive to-do list with check boxes. I also hope that it makes you smile!

How we built it

I built the website using mostly Velo by Wix, by implementing custom JavaScript and HTML code. Specific functionality that we created with custom code through Velo includes incrementing the progress bars over time, the ability to start/reset timers, and the moving/color changing buttons. I registered the fastbreaks.tech domain from domain.com, and then set up a URL redirect through redirect.pizza by working with DNS records and nameservers on domain.com and cloudflare.

Challenges we ran into

The most difficult challenges I ran into was learning how to use custom code with Velo, as well as writing the website functionality with JavaScript, due to a lack of significant prior experience with JavaScript. Also, it was very difficult to find a way to connect the domain.com domain to the website without paying money to upgrade my account. One challenge that I never figured out was using twilio, I was having lots of account issues trying to get a twilio phone number, and definitely could have saved time if I had just focused on other functionality of the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The two accomplishments I am most proud of would definitely be the user-controlled Pomodoro timers and getting the custom domain linked to our site and working. Another accomplishment I am proud of is the site design, I am very happy with the way it turned out!

What we learned

I learned so much about JavaScript, domain hosting/DNS records, and Velo! Also, I learned that it was important to make sure the technologies you want to use are going to work well with your application/idea. I definitely could have saved so much time if I hadn't tried to force twilio to work with my website.

What's next for Fast Breaks

In the future, we would like to add a notification system to let users know when their timers are up.

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