PayPal Battle Hack Wrap Up — Trash Heroes App

Back in July I attended the PayPal Battlehack Tel Aviv hackathon. It was an amazing event. I was a bit sceptical about PayPal doing a hackathon but I have to say PayPal really new what they were doing and it was an amazing event not to mention lot’s of great prizes.

My goals for the hackathon wasn’t to win even though it’s always good to win and everyone likes wining. But I wanted first to work in Meteor.JS and create my first web application with it. Second just to meet great people.

I have to say I did both and overall really glad I took the time to attend the event.

Event photo, event was packed and a great venue

I meet Aly Osha at the event, Aly was visiting Israel he’s originally from Russia and decide to attend his first hackathon event in Israel. It was great to work with him and I’m glad we joined to create our team. Second goal done!

Aly bought the idea and the second I heard it knew I wanted to work on it.

The Problem

So back to the idea, in Tel Aviv and in Israel we have areas that need cleaning up. Even parks, playgrounds and so forth. The city does what it can but we still have “dead spaces” areas that are just not clean.

Let’s be honest we’re not the cleanest city or country and it’s time we take action!

The solution

Trash Heroes is all about crowd funding to clean up areas or problems and bring awareness to those places that need cleaning.

It’s simple you can post a place that needs cleaning via your mobile phone yes it’s a mobile app as well and donate to the cause anything from $1 to $10.

Places with the most votes are pushed to the top to create awareness via the voting and crowd funding amount of course users can help promote a place.

Everything is built in around the list which is Reddit style list based on votes, comments and amount to be paid if you take action.

People that don’t have the time or are not ready to clean a place IE “take Action” can donate. Once a place reaches a good amount of crowd funding a person or group can decided to take action and clean that area up.

City municipalities can monitor to see what people are talking about and what needs cleaning but more importantly companies can donate or even take action like Adopt a highway.

Development Specifications

The application was developed in Meteor.JS which is amazing I used Twitter Bootstrap for the design and Mongo DB for the database.

You can check out the application at trash-heroes.meteor.com but do note it’s a very early version, prototype and not finished. Only had 24 hours to develop and was the only developer on the team.

I was able to get a lot done thanks to Meteor.JS like full comment system, voting system, social login (GitHub for testing), Google maps integration, simple PalPay integration (required for the event) and more. But of course there are still a lot of bugs and issues.

The following is the list view, everything is focussed on the list which is a Reddit style list based on voting and the crowd funding amount.