SlugsAboard

Inspiration

As UCSC students, we felt that it could be difficult to find clubs and events on campus, so we were inspired to create a way to make the process of sharing these campus events easier.

What it does

SlugsAboard allows students to sign in with their school google account and post information about events. These events then appear in chronological order on the front page of the site.

How we built it

We first used Figma to design the layout and style our user interface. We then created the backend for our site using Express.js and a Microsoft Azure SQL database. The frontend was created using React. Finally, we hosted our site on a Microsoft Azure app service.

Challenges we ran into

The first major challenge we encountered was the connecting to our database from our backend code. Luckly, with a bit more research, we were able to resolve this issue. A few other issues we encountered included allowing users to login with Google using the Google Authentication API, and correctly formatting our user interface. We were eventually able to resolve all of these issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were successfully able to create and deploy a web app with working functionality under a very limiting time constraint. Since this was the first hackathon each member of our team has attended, this was a major accomplishment.

What we learned

As a team, we were able to learn and improve our skills in several major technologies including React, Express.js, Figma, Google APIs, and Microsoft Azure. Most importantly, we also gained great experiences working as a team through complicated problems and design decisions.

What's next for SlugsAboard

We may continue to work on SlugsAboard in the future, adding new features and making the UI more polished. Overall, we had a great time working on this project and it has inspired us to participate in similar events in the future.