imy draws inspiration from the universal human desire to revisit and share cherished memories. We were particularly inspired by the simplicity and addictive nature of the iconic Flappy Bird game, as well as the nostalgic appeal of an 8-bit design style. Our goal was to blend the engaging mechanics of a beloved game with the warmth of reminiscing on the good old days.
imy is a gamified social media application that revitalizes the charm and nostalgia of the past. Users not only relive some of their favourite memories, but are also able to reconnect with old friends, reminded of the countless hours of fun that they've spent together.
Upload photos in response to daily memory prompts like "A time you learned a new skill," or "Your first photo with a best friend," as well as prompts from different times/periods in your life. Posts can be liked by friends, with each like increasing the user's score. The app features a Flappy Bird-themed leaderboard, displaying leaders and encouraging friendly competition. Additionally, users can customize their profiles with really cute avatars!
We built imy as a native mobile application with React Native and Expo Go. For the backend, we used Node.js, Express, and MongoDB. We chose this stack because of our team's relative familiarity with JavaScript and frontend development, and our team's interest in learning some backend and mobile development. This stack allowed us to learn both skills without having to learn new languages, and also deploy a cool app that we could run natively on our phones!
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was learning the intricacies of React Native and backend development; we had originally thought that React Native wouldn't be too difficult to pick up, because of our previous experience with React. Although the languages are similar, we ran into some bugs that took us quite some time to resolve! Bugs, bugs, bugs were the pests of the weekend, as we spent hours trying to figure out why images weren't uploading to the backend, or why profile icons kept returning NaN. It didn't help that Railway (where we hosted our backend) had a site-wide crash during that debugging session :(
Additionally, we wanted to use Auth0 for our authentication, but we found out after much too long that it did not work with Expo Go.
Stepping out of our comfort zones forced us to think on our feet and be constantly learning over the last 36 hours, but it was definitely worth it in the end!
As a team comprised of all beginner hackers, we're super proud that we were able to come up with a cool idea and push ourselves to complete it within 36 hours! UofTHacks was two of our team members' first hackathon, and our most experienced member has only been to 2 hackathons herself.
In terms of the final product, we're really happy with the retro-style design and our creative, nostalgia-themed idea. We worked really hard this weekend, and we learned so much!
We learned how to deploy a backend, make a native app, and merge conflicts (there were a lot of them, and not just in git!). We learned what we're capable of doing in just 36 hours, and had lots of fun in the process.
We love the idea behind imy and it's definitely a project that we'll continue working on post UoftHacks! There's lots of code refactoring and little features that we'd love to add, and we think the cute frontend design has a lot of promise. We're extremely excited for the future of imy, and we hope to make it even better soon.
