Throughout my life I only saw mental health issues on the TV. I considered mental health issues as other people problems until I saw it manifest within my family and friends. Now I'm scared of the thought that someone I love, cherish, and respect could experience something dramatic and terrifying alone. Even worse, being hurt/kill while reaching out for help.

A sad by-product of going through a mental health crisis and using social media as a “call for help” is that person's reputation is shredded and people who aren't dedicated to that person safety. I have found that this adds to the drama and fuel the fire of paranoia.

The app is called “Help Me” and is designed primarily as an “SOS” (distress signal) to a selected circle of trusted people.

• One push of a button will send a “I am having a mental crisis” message and a location to the trusted people.
• Create a trusted community around the user with private conversations and a system to show their emotions. This will help the trusted people to be aware of the user range of emotions.

Miguel Hernandez and I have entered the DigitalOcean App Platform Hackathon as a avenue to build this app. The category is Program for the People and specifically mental health.

This is an opportunity to learn, build, deploy, and scale an application with DigitalOcean.

This is the initial wireframe.

This is the final wireframe.

Day 1 Activities

• An GitHub repository was quickly spun up to a basic Angular application. We used GitHub's projects to break the app into tasks.

• We talked about what parts of the application that we know how to complete and what parts will be a challenge. We discussed what would be to consider an MVP version, version 2, and version 3.

• We decided to use Angular 11 for front-end and NodeJS for the backend. TailwindCSS will be used for styling. The app will be hosted on the DigitalOcean platform. Finally, GitHub will be used for version control and GitHub projects for task management.

What's Next

• Tomorrow goal is to start learning TailwindCSS and building the Log-in screen.

Stay on the lookout for a Day 2 breakdown blog post!!!