Volunteer and help to change the world
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We had plenty of ideas for this hackathon, more than twenty, but xxx was by far the best one. Indeed, we were looking for a project helping the community and fitting into multiple tracks. And so the winning idea was born, relying on the numbers of volunteering and towards the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Did you know that 63 million Americans are involved in volunteering? That’s around 25% of all adults in the USA. Worldwide, there are near a billion volunteers who count as 2.5% of the global economy! On the other hand, the NU has a vast program with 17 goals to reach by 2030, including no poverty, zero hunger, Gender Equality, Clean Water, Clean Energy and Climate action.
Our idea is the creation of a website which will help people volunteering, thus contributing to the UN goals! Users will be able either to contribute to already existing projects or to create new ones and gather volunteers for their implementation. The website targets all layers of society: people, enterprises, non-profit organizations, etc. More specifically, users will increase volunteering if they can find easily and quickly the right project to work on. Therefore, we will allow people to meet, interact and work together on projects. In short, we animate the community and increase its dynamism towards a better future! We also help companies valorizing the territory where they work and give them the possibility to manage and choose the best projects to finance. We give them the possibility to strengthen their public image in a greener and social way. Non-profit organizations that rely on volunteering will increase their visibility and thus attract potential volunteers who are interested in promoting and participating in existing or new projects. This will make them work much faster and efficient! Above all, we help the NU and humanity going a step closer to core milestones, the 2030 goals.
Good projects require great technologies. We used the best one in every field. Discord for communicating, Repl for pair programming in real-time. We then directly uploaded the code to GitHub. Moving on to serious things, we preferred using plain old HTML and CSS for the front-end to implement the back-end with flask and jinja. We used SQLite as a database, it’s easier to install and use, and the resulting database is a single file in our project. We also used some amazing 3D gradients and glassmorphism to make our UI, two very cool emerging ways of styling a 3d website.
The whole project was a big challenge for us. Maybe because it is a new experience or because we are both 15 years old.
Lorenzo: “The fact is that it was a real challenge for me, not only over the weekend but over the past years. When I look back at the 13 years old me, what a change, a new world has opened to me! First, I learned a whole language, English, that I barely knew beforehand. Second I started from scratch and alone and I had to keep high my motivation over the past years to be able to learn and progress. Sometimes I thought I would spend my time better playing video games or watching cat videos on youtube. Temptation was hard but I resisted! Also, I have to admit that I’ve never talked with a developer (in person). And I’ve never seen anyone else write code. But I must say that the dev community is truly amazing, people are very open to help you! It was also nice getting interest in the articles I posted on the web. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has published online courses, especially free ones, allowing me as well as many other persons to learn coding.”
Conner: “I was the main developer in the front end and back end parts of the website. The most challenging part for me was to write the correct text, and at first, coming up with the design and idea.Thankfully, Lorenzo did most of the writing for me and that saved me a lot of time. The making part of the site was a breeze for me because I am a fast and ambitious coder, but waking up at 3:30AM in the morning, you’d know how that would feel. It was great though. One of the technical problems I ran into was styling the navigation bar and styling the page where a post is viewed. I am not that good at spacing things out with CSS. I solved it by trial and error. The problems took about an hour and a half out of my build time, but I managed to complete it.” I add (if you want): “That shows us how small things can make us lose a lot of time…”
Making a working website! It’s already something, isn’t it? Then having done something for others. Something that empowers the fundamental values of the whole humanity. Not just another one of those sites focused only on themselves. Our values are clear: Sustainability, Equity, Solidarity, Innovation, Partnership. We are client-focused, this site is for you, not for us. I am proud of what we did because we accepted and face the challenge without fear. We’ve done and learned something new. Here I am, doing my first hackathon, launching my first big project, finishing my first website. That’s my achievement.
Conner: “This was my first hackathon where I worked with someone else, and it was an amazing experience. Lorenzo was a huge help in giving me a flowing stream of inspiration, persistence, and the willingness to push on and not give up. If it wasn’t for him, I couldn’t have made this. I have skills, but not a mind like that. I feel happy that I finished this hackathon.”
Lorenzo: "First I’ve learned that people don’t sleep at night during hackathons. :-) Then this experience just confirmed the enormous interest I have for coding, this is what I want to do! I improved my communication skills, both with writing and presentations. I discovered the incredible world of pair programming and how everything changes when you are no longer alone doing a project. When you are not the only one working at night, when you are not the only one who believes and works for the realization of the project. And Conner is such a good dev, it would have just remained an idea without him! And on the technical side, I started learning flask and jinja. I learned the power of GitHub as version control. I also started understanding better back-end concepts I was studying, like SQL, authentification, CRUD operations… In a nutshell, I enjoyed a lot the hackathon, which was truly enriching!"
Conner: "I feel like I’ve improved a lot. I’ve learned a lot of communication skills and I’ve learned some coding design and functionality techniques. Every time I complete a hackathon, I always gain some knowledge from it, but in this one, I learned more than any hackathon before. I really enjoyed this hackathon. This is a good drive for me to compete more."
Built With #javascript, #html, #css, #sql, #sqlite, #python, #flask
Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GgYKkaBDwpMgMIW59Lra1EExp8iOjtmTKrvyLgDtUDI/edit?usp=sharing Website: ideasiteentry.devunited.repl.co DevPost: https://devpost.com/software/let-s-goal?ref_content=user-portfolio&ref_feature=in_progress
Thanks for reading!
Let's Goal, Volunteer and help to change the world