ecoQuest

EcoQuest was a hackathon project where my team of five built a mobile app around environmental activism. None of us had done mobile development before, so we picked up Expo and React Native and just figured it out as we went.

We spent the first week planning, sketching out ideas, making prototypes in Figma, and mapping out how users would move through the app. A couple of us had used Flask for backend work before, but React Native was completely new territory for everyone.

The learning curve was pretty steep. We spent two days getting used to React Native and Expo, then another day on Flask basics. Despite that, we got a working prototype done in 48 hours. We had to cut a lot of features along the way, but we still had something to show the judges. We did not win anything, but it was still a good learning experience.

One of the bigger headaches was that our team used a mix of iOS and Android devices, which caused a lot of environment issues throughout development. Bugs kept popping up and we had to troubleshoot them on the fly.

Looking back, EcoQuest was a good experience even if the final product was not what we originally planned. Going from knowing nothing about mobile development to shipping a working app in a few days was pretty satisfying. It also taught me to just start building things instead of overthinking them.