CityGuidr
Planning an activity can be hard
During the half year before my graduation, I enrolled in the Minor REBEL. REBEL stands for: Real Experience Borderless Entrepreneurial Learning. Because of my interest in Entrepreneurship I thought I’d be a fitting Minor to choose. Combined with my passion for technology I and my team started to brainstorm about problems that we could be fixing with technology.
What we came up with was the problem around planning daily activities that can be done all throughout the world. There were many sites that listed different options about activities to persue, but not all activities we knew about the city that we were in were listed. That city was the city of Rotterdam. With this information we started talking to the companies that hosted the activities, and what their thoughts were about the current platforms available to list activities. With the information we got out of their feedback we began brainstorming about a solution.
The CityGuidr Application
We came up with the idea of an application and website, that hosted all sorts of different activities to be done in the world. Users could tell the application what their favorite sort of activities were, and the application would then algorithmically connect the users to the activities. This would make it easy for the user to choose which activities to undertake.
Next to making it easy for users to find activities, we would also make it easy for them to plan their day, including the way they'd need to travel to get to the activity. We'd make sure there would be a clear overview of the journey as well as the tickets to get into the activity right from within the app. CityGuidr would would be all they need on a day out.
Video
My role
The team that I was in consisted of three people. Though we all worked together most of the time we all had one area in which we excelled. One teammate was focused on the business side of things, the other focused on the design element, and I focused on the technical part of the project. I was in full ownership of the backend, and thought of the best fitting architecture for the platform we were trying to build.
What I came up with was a headless architecture that loosely coupled our main backend with the opportunity of multiple frontends. Our backend was an API written in NodeJs using the Express framework. This API was connected to a MongoDB database. The backend was the provider of information to multiple frontends including the showing of various activities, as well as running algorithms to couple the users to the best fitting activities.
There were also two different frontends build, one was for the admins to fill the database with various activities, and the other was the website that would be used by the users of the platform. Both frondends were built in React.
