Two weeks ago, we began development work with just two expo markers and a whiteboard. We gathered in a Stanford meeting room and mapped out our tech stack, our proof of concept featureset, and our development flow. 94 github commits (and a few sleepless nights) later, the Synapse proof of concept application is complete!
With the current Synapse app, users can drop pins on an interactive map to report infrastructure changes. Users can specify the severity of an infrastructure change, and also upvote and downvote events reported by others. In order to limit data consumption, our app also provides a “sync” button to allow users to fetch changes posted by others.
The Synapse proof of concept is a full stack application. Our ReactJS frontend runs on an Android device and communicates with our backend server. Our backend is built on the Flask framework, is written in Python, and integrates with a SQL database. We deployed the Python backend and SQL database using “pythonanwhere”, a quick cloud deployment tool. With this full stack deployment, users on the proof of concept app can drop pins to each other from different phones.
Each team member contributed core features for our proof of concept. John tackled front-end UI development, building buttons and modals to help users report infrastructure changes and change event ratings. Jordan took point on the map interface, using the MapBox ReactJS API to build droppable pins and a scrollable map. Jacob wrote our server code, using Flask, Python, and pythonanywhere.com to deploy a restful Python server. Josh built our SQL database by writing a series of initialization scripts, and wrote networking code on the front-end to integrate our ReactJS app with our Python server.
On Friday, our team got the chance to present our work at Oracle Headquarters. We presented to Oracle President of Product Development Thomas Kurian (!!), our advisors Jenny and Ashish, and Oracle media whiz Lauren Cohn. We also got a great tour of Oracle campus. Thank you to everyone at Oracle that made the day so great–we felt lucky to share our product development process with you all.
Over the next week, we’ll be gathering feedback on our proof of concept and overall business strategy. Recent meetings with Sam Edelson (entrepreneur and investor) and Julie Stanford (founder, SlicedBread Design) have helped us consider next steps for the Synapse product. Stay tuned!
Synapse 