Check In: Twilio April 2020 Hackathon

Cory Mortimer Martin — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 03:28:45 +0000

What I built

Check In: An app to keep friends and family up-to-date with each other's lives.

You can think of Check In as a monthly holiday newsletter. With Check In, you can create a group of people in which you would like to stay in contact with. First, you create a group name and add the emails of the people you would like to correspond with. Next, Check In will send an email to all of the group members asking for an update in their lives. Recipients can reply to the email with an update. Within a few days, Check In will compile the responses into one newsletter that will be sent out to the group. After a month, Check In will start the cycle over.

Category Submission:

I feel Check In falls under the COVID-19 Communications category. Check In allows those friends and family to keep in touch. Where Check In really shines is that there is no requirement for users to learn a new system. For most users, all they will need to do is reply to an email, which many people may already know how to do.

Demo Link

Feel free to use the instance hosted at https://checkin.corymortimer.com. Otherwise, feel free to spin up an instance yourself!

Link to Code

CoryMortimer / check-in

Hackathon April 2020

Check In app for Twilio Hackathon April 2020

Check out the live instance at https://checkin.corymortimer.com/

About

This is an app developed for the Twilio Hackathon on DEV. It has been created and developed throughout the month of April.

How it works

Think of "Check In" as a monthly version of a holiday family card or newsletter. Every month, Check In notifies users that it is time to give an update to the group that they are a part of. Once the update time window has expired, a "newsletter" is sent to everyone in the group that contains each person's submission.

Software Stack

PostgreSQL
Express framework with Node.js
React framework with JavaScript

Features

Create multiple groups specific to your social circles (such as friends and family) to obtain updates from.
Send updates all from email. The only time a user must use the app is for the initial setup of…

View on GitHub

How I built it

PostgreSQL
Express framework with Node.js
React framework with JavaScript

I learned a lot about SQL. I feel more comfortable on the frontend but I was able to get something up an working on the backend, which I am proud of.

For hosting, I am using Netlify and Heroku. I originally wanted to use Azure Functions, but there is an issue with setting multiple cookies from a function that I could not (and did not want to spend any more time on to) get around. I do use an Azure Function for the daily trigger to check to see if emails need to be sent.

Additional Resources/Info

Make sure to check out my Github for screenshots and diagrams of the system!

DEV Community: Cory Mortimer Martin