[5NT-1] WanderBuddy

Inspiration

We were inspired by recent travel plans created by friends during the summer holidays. Friends often create telegram groups to share pictures taken during the trip, and upload it onto social media afterwards. We enjoy the thrill of emotions during our various holidays, but are often too tired at the end of the day to journal, leaving us with vague memories of what happened throughout our adventure.

We wanted to find a convenient way for tourists to collate their memories and keep track of rich details of their experiences. With these stories, we hope that users can likewise inspire other friends to follow their trails, and enrich their sense of adventure.

What it does

Link to Video Try it out on Telegram @WanderBuddyBot

** Core Functionality

Create routes and keep track of the various attractions users have visited
Allow users to upload photos and notes that reflect their emotions during the travel
Share the route with their friends, who could save it for inspiration in their next holiday
Shareable link for friends to view images!

How we built it

We chose a Telegram Bot as the main interface for users to interact with our application, as we felt it was the most convenient and portable way for users as the go about their travels. It also had the additional benefit of being able to be added to telegram groups which are likely to already exist between travel buddies.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble integrating with Supabase API since it seems that some of the documentation was incorrect! As it was the first time for all of us to create a Telegram bot, we faced many struggles testing and tinkering with the Telegram API. For example, we realised that we could not send locations on Windows Desktop client, but figured that it was still okay since we intend for our users to be mobile users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we managed to integrate the frontend and the telegram Bot, for users to have a UI to display their images. We are also proud of the user-flow that we came up with, as we had to try many different iterations before coming up with our current user-flow. We prioritized convenience for our users and thought that our final product was something we were happy with.

What we learned

We learnt the importance of managing workflow, and efficiently allocating tasks. We found that there was some down time between members when we were unsure of what tasks to work on, as we had to wait for our teammates to finish their tasks. On hindsight, it would have been better to fully plan out our tasks for the whole Hackathon

What's next for WanderBuddy

Access Controls for users seeing images
Editing and collaboration of routes in communities! We love to see travellers share their ideas and comments about the attractions they visited.
Shareable blog link.
- Currently, we only have links to view images at a location! We want to extend this to be able to view routes in a bloggable format, to aid avid travel bloggers in their blogging.