LocaLink is an app for Android and iOS designed to bring local communities together without the need to share personal information such as email or phone numbers. Localink aims to be the one-stop shop for online community interaction, avoiding the need for several groups and pages across many different platforms, making all the information about a building or neighbourhood organised and accessible. Features include user sign-in, community homepages, management announcement pages, group chats, community calendars, marketplaces and dedicated lost-and-found pages, among others.

We used the following technologies: React Native, Expo, Expo Go, Firebase, Firestore, TypeScript, npm, and Version Control with Git.

For this project we chose React Native for our frontend, which enabled us to craft a versatile application compatible with both Android and iOS devices. React Native presented us with an array of invaluable libraries and tools, including date selectors and image uploaders, which played a pivotal role in our app's functionality. To further enrich our expertise and leverage additional capabilities, we incorporated TypeScript in our project. For our backend infrastructure, we opted for Firebase, which streamlined our workflows significantly. By choosing a non-relational database early on, we gained the flexibility to mold our data structure as needed and pave the way for future expansions.

One of the significant challenges we encountered throughout our project was setting context at the correct points and along all the paths users could follow. This allows communities to be dynamic without the need to fetch data on every page, providing a seamless user experience. Simultaneously, diving into numerous new technologies simultaneously presented a considerable hurdle during the initial stages. Debugging became particularly arduous as we encountered a multitude of unfamiliar errors. However, as the first week progressed, we gradually gained familiarity with the technologies, and these challenges became less prominent. These two factors, combined, posed the biggest challenges in our project. Nonetheless, through collaborative teamwork and leveraging each other's strengths, we successfully overcame these hurdles. It is worth acknowledging that imposter syndrome also crept in at times, as we questioned our abilities and felt unsure about our capabilities. Nevertheless, we persisted and remained resilient, ultimately achieving remarkable progress within LocaLink over the past two weeks.