Description as a Tweet:

As college students in 2020, we face two challenges every day: fulfilling our seemingly endless responsibilities and taking care of our mental health. We built OtterTab to do both.

Visit us at https://ottertest2.wm.r.appspot.com/

Documentation: https://tinyurl.com/ya6mrls6

Inspiration:

As computer science students and passionate programmers, we love challenging ourselves and pushing our limits every day. We wanted to build a tool that would help us and many like us do more with the time we have. We also wanted something truly functional that we could all use by the end of this hackathon that would improve our quality of life, even if by just a bit.

What it does:

OtterTab is meant to:
1. help you manage your time
2. improve your mental health
3. keep you organized

We achieved this by building a landing page that provides Google Calendar integration, a quick notes section, and a mood tracker. All of this is laid out on a beautiful UI that is intuitive and reactive.

How we built it:

We built the front end using React and used the Ant Design UI framework. We used Google OAuth2 to implement synchronization across multiple computers.

The Calendar integration uses the Google Calendar API to synchronize events from your Google Calendar into the OtterTab display.

The notes and mood tracker history are stored in a Firebase database.

Finally, we deployed OtterTab on GCP App Engine.

Technologies we used:

• HTML/CSS
• Javascript
• Node.js
• React
• Misc

Challenges we ran into:

The majority of our team hasn't used React before. Two-thirds of our team!

None of us are designers, or even have basic knowledge of what looks good...

There is no Google OAuth API for react, so setting it up involved writing a lot of hacky code.

Syncing with and linking into Firebase was difficult to get working with React.

We had trouble maintaining the states of signed in/out status and updating elements and data.

We suck with DNS.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

Quality and polish of the UI.

The functionality solves real problem, and OtterTab is a real product we plan to use in our daily lives.

Each of us gained valuable technical skills from this project: React, UI/UX design, Firebase, and various APIs.

We're also closer friends! We had a great time working together (and sleeping very, very late) in a time where social interactions are scarce.

What we've learned:

Technical: React, UI/UX design, Firebase, and various APIs, architecture/Object-oriented design, reusable components, shared codebase, user stories.

What's next:

Improve note capabilities with editing and hierarchies.

Create and edit Google Calendar events.

More versatility on mood tracker (more moods).

Temporal sentiment analysis of user’s moods (inference).

Built with:

React

Firebase (database to store notes and moods)

GCP App Engine (hosting)

Google Calendar API

Ant Design (UI/UX Framework)

Domain.com (DNS)

Github

Prizes we're going for:

• Best Documentation
• Best Web Hack
• Best Domain Name
• Best Healthcare Hack
• Best Use of Google Cloud

Akshay Heda
Benjamin Darnell
Daniel Guo

Table TBD