Inspiration We think people have felt separated during COVID. One teammate stopped going to church because of COVID and found it has been tough to connect with others.

What it does Allows people to anonymously enter prayers or say prayers for others. We feel this will lead to more gratitude and happiness by our users. In turn, this will lead to more personal connections.

How we built it We first thought it would be a React front end and a Golang back end, but we lost our React expert early on and could not get the Golang to run from the live website. So... we pivoted to PHP for both. The SQL calls are embedded in the pages.

Challenges we ran into Early on we lost an expert React teammate and others who thought about joining backed out. This caused us to pivot on our tech stack.

Accomplishments that we're proud of The website is live!

What we learned Technically - We installed XAMPP on our laptops to be able to locally test PHP code. It was also a first to set up SQL databases for some of us. Postman was awesome for testing database APIs calls. Socially - We learned to keep cool and go with the flow during a hackathon. We cannot control what other people decide and time is too short to let those decisions weigh us down.

What's next for prayers.network Technically - Maybe enhance the CSS, but the site is looking sharp now as is. Maybe multiple languages. Socially - Let others know about the site and promote its use. Business wise - Decide if we want ads. The site is very clean right now and we like the idea of keeping it that way.