Bridge: Empowering Communities and Fresh Starts with GitHub Copilot

Hi there! This is my entry for the GitHub Copilot Challenge: Fresh Starts

What I Built

Meet Bridge – an app that connects homeless individuals with vital goods and services offered by local businesses and charities. It’s all about creating fresh starts and building stronger communities. With Bridge, people can easily find:

• Shelters and food banks.
• Medical and mental health services.
• Job training and employment opportunities.
• Real-time notifications about goods and services nearby.

The goal? To make it simple for those who need help to connect with those who want to give it, fostering a sense of support and renewal. It’s my take on tackling a real-world problem in a meaningful way.

Demo

Check it out here: Live Demo

Repo

sgf-HonestAnt / bridge-app

Bridge

Bridge is a social good app designed to connect homeless individuals with essential goods and services provided by local businesses and charities. It aims to build a bridge between those in need and those who can help, fostering a sense of community, renewal, and support.

This project is my submission for GitHub's Copilot 1-Day Build Challenge.

Features

For Homeless Individuals

• Find Resources: Locate nearby food, shelter beds, and free services.
• Request Services: Request assistance such as free haircuts or laundry services.
• Notifications: Receive real-time alerts about available goods and services in your area.

For Charities

• Manage Resources: Post and update availability of shelter beds, meals, and other resources.
• Promote Events: Share details of upcoming events like soup kitchens or donation drives.
• Invite Users: Invite other charities to join the platform.

For Businesses

• Share Surplus Goods: Post leftover food or unsold items to reduce waste and help those in…

View on GitHub

Copilot Experience

GitHub Copilot was like a coding buddy that had my back through the whole process. Here’s how it helped me bring Bridge to (early, not super pretty or functional - yet) life:

• Autocomplete Magic: It sped up my workflow with spot-on suggestions, from small utility functions to fully-fledged React components.
• Smart Prompts: Copilot Chat helped me tackle tricky features like pagination, dynamic routing, and managing local storage like a pro.
• Debugging Superpowers: It guided me through solving deployment issues (hello, Suspense boundaries for useSearchParams!).
• Refactoring Help: Copilot suggested better ways to structure my code, making everything cleaner and easier to maintain.
• Tailwind CSS Styling: It recommended beautiful, semantic classes for a sleek, user-friendly design.

Basically, all things that I could do flying solo, but nowhere near as fast!

And when I ran out of free Copilot credits, I also leaned on Amazon Q and ChatGPT to keep things moving. Their input was super helpful for speeding up tasks and even polishing my written content.

Conclusion

Building Bridge has been an incredible experience. It’s a small but meaningful step toward addressing homelessness and creating connections that matter.

Through this project, I’ve seen how GitHub Copilot takes the stress out of coding, letting me focus on solving real problems. The whole process was not only efficient but genuinely inspiring.

What’s Next?

Here’s where I’d love to take Bridge in the future:
• Make the app more inclusive with enhanced accessibility features.
• Add real-time APIs for up-to-the-minute resource availability.
• Expand Bridge to work in more locations.
• Let users filter resources by distance, category, and keywords.

Thanks for hosting this awesome challenge – I can’t wait to see the amazing projects from others in the community!