https://devpost.com/software/fitconnect-fopluj?ref_content=user-portfolio&ref_feature=in_progress

fitConnect, an accessible fitness app that connects users based on similar goals and stats.

Our inspiration for fitConnect came from experiences of wanting to get into fitness but not having the right mindset to do so or being too nervous. fitConnect can help solve these issues that plague many people and prevent them from reaching the best version of themselves. We were reminded that exercising and practicing healthy lifestyles became much easier with fellow peers, family, friends, or team members. When you have other people around you with the same goals and interests, exercise turns from a solo, draining, and lonely activity into a collaborative and supportive time to spend with friends and enjoy together.

The app is a platform that allows you to share your goals, interests, and any other relevant information and find others doing the same who might be quite suitable and interested in connecting with others to build healthy lifestyles and reach your goals as a team. All of the relevant information that you’d like to share can be shared, and others can see it, as can you with others’ information. Once you happen to find someone who you think would be a good match, you can then start a chat with them on the same platform, and even add others who might be a good fit.

We built this application using a number of front-end languages, like HTML/CSS/JavaScript, plus the React.js library. This allowed us much more customizability with relative ease. We used Google’s Firebase for the back-end, specifically their authentication services. Finally, we used chatengine.io to help build the chat feature on our platform. As for hosting the web application, this was done using the Firebase Hosting service by Google.

With most of the languages, frameworks, and/or libraries in this project, we were pretty much complete beginners. We had very little experience in React.js, but did have some in HTML/CSS/Javascript. We also had no experience using Google’s Firebase, which was a fascinating experience to see how accessible the tools they offer are. However, due to our inexperience, we definitely took longer on some tasks than we needed to, struggling to figure out the solutions to many problems and features we planned.

We’re proud of having a product to deliver, despite its flaws, and one that we can call a little unique amongst the general crowd. We are also proud of taking on such a challenge and tackling more new technologies.

• Using Figma to collaborate on a cohesive theme for fitConnect
• To work collaboratively, motivate generously, and network maturely
• How to interact with APIs on local development servers
• Learned how to plan priorities and project scope better
• Integrating multiple graphic design platforms to create a cohesive logo.
• We learned to prepare better ahead of time, where we could experiment and introduce ourselves to a new language or tech if needed, rather than banking on learning from scratch right at the start of the hackathon.

We would like to give users more agency, control, and customization over which information they want to share, such as including an input box to give a brief but personalized self-intro or share some interesting things. This would also include choosing which options they would feel most comfortable sharing. Besides that, our team is working towards creating a mobile version of the app to increase accessibility. Finally, we’d like to implement an automated way of matching people, possibly using machine learning. This way, it’s easier and also more reliable for users to find others they would fit well with.