## Inspiration
* UCI’s creative minds have long been lacking a platform to showcase their projects that inspire entrepreneurship, creativity, and public outreach. We were inspired to build an application that facilitates collaboration and exposure solely for UCI students, allowing them to reach more people and take their ideas to the next level.

## What it does
* This platforms allows for students to show off their projects. Projects can vary from a business idea to a volunteering event.
* When logged students can star the project if they are interested in participating or just simply like it.
* Events can also be created while logged in.
* Events created and starred will show up in the profile section of each user.
* When on the homepage, projects are ordered top to bottom based on the number of stars that they receive.

## How we built it
* We built the platform using Flask and SQLAlchemy to keep track of projects, users, and stars.
* The app is also deployed on Google Cloud Platform App Engine using a SQL database.
* With love.

## Challenges we ran into
* There was a definite learning curve to fully understanding the Flask framework and SQLAlchemy.
* We had trouble updating the stars, so that when a user clicked on them, it would toggle the front end and the back end.
* We also had to find a way to make sure that the starred events section of the profile page was not populated with events created by the current user
* We also had issues when trying to migrate from our local SQLite DB to a MySQL DB on GCP.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of
* We are proud of the general UI of the website since it looks and feels very modern.
* We were also able to complete most of the features we had planned.

## What we learned
* We learned a lot about general web development and how something might seem relatively simple but still take a significant amount of time. We also discovered a lot of details behind deploying an application and integrating it with an online database.

## What's next for Made In UCI
* The Made In UCI website is the first phase of a larger “Made In UCI” initiative that hopes to help cultivate and show off the entrepreneurial spirit at UCI. We would like to expand the platform to have a more robust profile system, allowing users to search through the talent pool at UCI to build a team. Need an iOS developer? A graphic designer? A backend engineer? Made In UCI will help you form the perfect team.
* Additional features: search by project/user, comment on projects, iFrames for previewing projects, Show top projects of month/year/all time