The COVID-19 virus has changed our life on a large scale in the past few years. As international students, every Brute Force TLE team member experienced remote university classes in different time zones for a whole year. We lost connection with UW folks and missed lots of opportunities. Those experiences motivate us to build a platform for every UW member to rebuild their relationship with each other.
We aim to create an application to connect UW folks academically and casually. As a result, we made our excellent app HuskyShake. Husky is the mascot of UW, and shake stands for connection, and our slogan is "Shake the place."
HuskyShake is a location-based social app that serves all UW members. Our intuition came from an interesting communicative behavior that every student had —— leaving messages from the desk and small table in the classroom and interacting with other students. We want to inherit this mode of communication in HuskyShake. Therefore, HuskyShake is a location-based app where people can access different buildings on the UW campus and publish or view messages that belong to that particular building. Opening the app, the user needs to log in first or register if they don't have an account. After logging in, a user interface and a map with multiple markers would pop up, where each marker stands for each building. Clicking the marker, the information about the building appears. For each building, we have two information boards that users can interact with, which are Casual Board and Event Board. Casual Board is designed for informal communication. After redirecting to the interface, the user would see a swipeable flashcard, where each flashcard has information on it. The user can swipe the card to show like or dislike depending on their direction. Event Board is designed for academic and formal communication like Job postings, Research opportunities, or academic notification by the University. Students or faculties can click any post in the Event Board interface and check its description. They can also publish their post by clicking the "+" button in the corner.
We designed our logo with an AI generator called Dall E. We built the app using expo as a frame, React-native as the front end, Firebase as our backend, and JavaScript as our primary language. Dubhacks only have 24 hours for hackers to create a project, which is short for building a full-stack application. Apart from that, we have no prior experience with React-native and expo, which are barely learned from the day before the DubHacks. In addition, React-native has a fast updating speed, and we struggle to follow the pace and search for available APIs that support the current version. Some of our original ideas are denied due to technical reasons, and some parts of our program are not fully completed. However, we still feel proud of our perseverance and hard work to build such a fantastic app.
In the future, we will still decide to continue developing HuskyShake. In October, we plan to upgrade features like location detection, location permission, history post, and a leaderboard system. In November, we decide to design user functions like user profile, report feature, DM request, and like/save posts. In December, we plan to optimize the app by optimizing the database, managing a massive number of threads, increasing the performance by algorithm, and upgrading our API. Beyond that, we can enlarge our service to a larger area, design functions for disabled people, and expand our app to other platforms.
To look at our project, view https://github.com/ConanYeah666/HuskyShake, and https://youtu.be/QI2ISBj3DT4.