"Hey, do you want to go sit together by the fireplace for a while?"
We at atoasty.space are on a mission - to provide everyone an easy access to a positive and inclusive environments to thrive in. To make the world a butter place, one toast at a time!
For us, the goal of this project is to help people - particularly young woman* of colour in STEM - get affirmation for their hard work and achievements to help reinforce their sense of self-worth and belonging.
This project was the blood, love and soul of four girls who wanted to make a change - most of us had to learn everything about web development tools from scratch (JavaScript, React, CSS, HTML, Figma) and utilize those skills on the day of the hack!
Nearing the end of the hack. We are proud to say that we accomplished more than we realize we could in 24 hours. We are proud of each of ourselves for the effort we exerted. We are proud of seeing our hard work pay off right in front of our eyes, and most of all, we are proud of each other.
Perhaps some day, if our paths were to cross once again, I would love nothing but another chance to collaborate with these amazing and lovely women again. I just want to thank each and one of them all for giving me this opportunity to learn, to laugh, and to hack with them.
~D
(We use * to specifically and intentionally include cis and trans women, as well as women-identifying non-binary, agender, or intersex people and other gender minorities.)
Our team decided to create this project, since mental health is something very important to all of us and so… this project was born. A Toasty Space is a web app where users can make accounts, and post anonymous positive messages to a toast board, where other users can read what you have to say! We wanted a cozy and warm environment <3
A Toasty Space was mostly built with Google Cloud Platform (with Firebase) & React on Glitch so we could all collaborate at the same time! This unfortunately means the GitHub repo doesn't have full commit history, but you can see when we pushed from Glitch! We had some mock-ups on Figma that were used as guidelines for the final project, but we ended up adjusting a lot in the CSS itself too. All of the graphics were created by our team during the hackathon, aside from the font which was a previously completed project! We connected our domain name from Domain.com... atoasty.space!
We have a functioning sign up and login, and all the pages of the site are available to view once you login! There were a lot of challenges and bugs along the way, including the fact that the only person on our team who had experience with React has only created one small single-page React app. We had to learn and pick up so much along the way, as well as adapt and compromise when things were not working out in order to move on and push through to completion (such as sass-loader not working!). We’re extra proud of Debby for coding so much CSS (the About Us page was mostly her!) when she picked it up for the first time less than 24 hours ago!
We have a lot of ideas on how to expand A Toasty Space! First off, we had intended on using Groundswell Salesforce Einstein API in order to help filter the intent of the messages to be positive only, but we did not have enough time. A report option would also be great, especially if we could use the data for the Einstein Prediction Builder to strengthen the filtering of messages and ensure a solely positive space! We’d also like to add an anonymous reply feature messages, if you want to let the original poster know that you’re also excited for them. A further customizable dashboard (the fireplace!) was also something we considered, but had to leave out due to time constraints.
Note that atoasty.space should be our URL, but should DNS records not point there in time, please use the secondary link under it! (a-toasty-space.glitch.me)