Botania - Plants to Surpass COVID-19
People have felt a void open up as COVID restrictions have increased. Botania lets people affected by COVID unite in one gardening driven community to overcome these trying times.
Created on 27th June 2021
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Botania - Plants to Surpass COVID-19
People have felt a void open up as COVID restrictions have increased. Botania lets people affected by COVID unite in one gardening driven community to overcome these trying times.
The problem Botania - Plants to Surpass COVID-19 solves
Botania is about connecting people with a common passion and unifying them in the face of COVID.
COVID has stolen almost everyone's freedom at one point in time, and this effect can be felt. Mental health issues become ever more prevalent all over the world.
COVID has taken a lot from everyone - whether it's friendships, family members or our ability to exercise & spend time outside.
Social Distancing has resulted in vastly increased Screen Time of the average teenager - before the pandemic, ~32% of 14-17 year-olds in the USA spent more than 4 hours daily on their mobiles - now that number has skyrocketed to 62%!
We as programmers may consider such an increase but a smidge of time in light of having sustained ourselves on energy drinks & code only over the last 36 hours. After all, it's not like socialising makes you better at programming after all ;)
However, considering these statistics apply to the national level, they illustrate how COVID has made us feel exacerbated, bored and uninspired to take on new challenges - it's much easier to fall down the youtube rabbit hole.
We want Botania to reinspire a community of people, highlight that everyone is struggling just as you are, form a COVID mental health support network and let people explore new areas of interest (in particular those related to botany).
I have to stop writing now as we still actually need to code the thing :/
Challenges we ran into
One issue was certainly collaboration over discord - our team, in general, had quite a horrific set of microphones, and that made communication occasionally difficult. We would have to resort to having certain people post their queries in the chat, which would help, but still, reduce our ability to exchange information drastically.
There was also a challenge in terms of finding a time to meet - I writing this, Titus, was the only person in my team outside of India (I'm tuning in from the UK). IST is however 4 and a half hours ahead of UK time and seeing as my school ends at 6 pm UK time, our meetings could get quite late. Whilst I'd like to take this opportunity to formally thank my teammates for "putting up with me", I know that we could have achieved more had we all been in one timezone.
A challenge I personally ran into was flutter - I'd never coded anything in flutter before, nor had I ever heard of it. Yet it seemed to me that every second person at HackTheMountains talked about their flutter experience - I suppose it's quite curious that flutter seems to be so much more popular in India than in Europe (as far as I'm aware). However, that's beside the point. I essentially had to learn flutter in 2 days - I did manage to get down the basics & thoroughly enjoyed doing so, but my skills pale in comparison to some of my teammates, and I know we could have technically done more had I specialised in an area I had had prior expertise in.
As a recommendation to future participants, I'd say it's important to have a good knowledge of the APIs etc. you are going to use, and where you can use technologies provided by MLH. This is something we really struggled with, and you can save yourself a lot of time by effectively using other people's code to do the heavy lifting.
You should also make sure you don't take on too much - sadly due to organisational difficulties we were unable to complete the blog functionality, something central to how our app would make an impact.