## Inspiration Forever in history books to come, COVID-19 will mark the year of 2020. The incredibly destructive pandemic made entire social and economic structures crumble. With social distancing in most of the world, communities and personal feelings of connection felt lost. Under quarantine orders, the already overworked middle class was unable to work. Amidst all the chaos, particular groups of individuals face higher risks and stakes associated with a potential contraction of COVID-19 and thus must take extra precautions to limit exposure. Among these groups include adults 65 and older, individuals with respiratory diseases, those with diabetes, and more. ## What it does Our project aims to match volunteers with people at higher risk for severe illness due to COVID-19 in order to fulfill basic services such as grocery delivery and tutoring. ## How we built it Dividing up the project into three modules, each team member took a crash course in back-end microservices, database management, and front-end web development. We built APIs that when invoked with information from someone seeking help, would add their name to a database. Similarly, another API adds volunteer information to its respective database. By parsing the database, we matched up volunteers and individuals needing assistance based on criteria such as services requested/offered and location relative to each other and returned that list to the volunteer who may fulfill the request. ## Challenges we ran into The biggest challenge was the limited time in which we all had to learn our respective parts. Preethi (me), Aishwarya, and Raymond had to take a crash course on how to build and scale a web application, along with relevant coding in JavaScript, Python, HTML, CSS, and working with neDB along the way. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of We are immensely proud to put together a minimum viable product in such a short period of time. It took a lot of fast-paced innovation, learning, and building. Additionally, our great communication skills allowed us to help each other and make sure that our project was on track for completion. Finally, our resolve to help our communities in this time of great need motivates us to continue working on this project in order well past the PlexHacks Hackathon. ## What we learned Along with our newfound full-stack technical skills and the ability to build/scale web applications, we improved our skills on adaptability. We understand that one of the most important qualities of a computer scientist and developer is the ability to learn on the job and get work done on a deadline. These were put to the test, along with our ability to openly communicate, and we managed to pull through. ## What's next for Helping Hands As previously mentioned, our resolve to helping our communities, especially members whom are most vulnerable, will drive us to continue working on this project. Shortly, we hope to deploy and put this product to use. Finally, post-pandemic, we believe that this technology and application can be adapted to suit the needs of the ever-changing world by continually providing our community with the help it needs.