Waypost

Home Page
Points Page

Inspiration

We noticed that tourists often buy items like umbrellas, hiking sticks, or travel gear during a trip, only to leave them behind or throw them away because they can’t fit them in their luggage. Tourism is a major global industry that, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, contributes over $10 trillion USD to the world economy each year. This translates to a massive amount of money wasted and unnecessary garbage generated.

What it does

Waypost addresses this issue by creating a web-app based circular economy system for tourists, inspired by the idea of Facebook Marketplace, to encourage reusing items while traveling. Our infrastructure allows tourists to donate, trade, or pick up reusable items while they explore. We designed our platform around three main stakeholders: Tourists: They can browse listings, pick up reusable items, use them during their trip, and then drop them off at an approved location. Tourists earn points, which can be redeemed for discounts in local businesses and also act as a credit system, encouraging honest exchanges and participation in the circular economy. Local Businesses: Cafes, restaurants, or outdoor shops can sign up as drop-off and pick-up spots. This both drives foot traffic to their locations and promotes sustainability, while providing a convenient location for tourists to exchange items. Eco-retailers: Businesses selling high quality reusable products offer products that tourists can donate to the circular system after use. This provides an advertising platform for retailers and encourages sustainable production.

How we built it

Frontend: React, Tailwind CSS, Leaflet serving OpenStreetMap, Vite Backend: FastAPI, Firestore Database, Firebase Auth via Admin SDK, Image hosting via Cloudinary Upload API

Challenges we ran into

Kai Zhang: It took me an entire hour to successfully setup Tailwind CSS, and then another 2 hours to get the Firebase to work properly.

Kyle Su: The greatest challenge I faced was integrating the Firebase database to the backend, and communicating how to setup the process to teammates (since it uses different Keys for each person). It was especially difficult to get Kai's to work.

Kyle Han: Some challenges I faced working on the backend of the project was resolving merge errors that constantly conflicted with my commits I tried to make in the files.

Wilson Li: My biggest problem was wrapping the content of each page with UI and incorporating animated backgrounds without breaking everything else.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this is the first Hackathon for every one of us, we are proud that we were able to construct a working web app within the 24h time limit given. The experience is novel, and is the first time we spent so much time in one day solely on programming.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the development process, including collaboration on Github, the different APIs and databases we used, and coding in collaboration in general.