The Sylar Project DO Hackathon Submission
Tags: dohackathon, mentalhealth
Published: 2021-01-05 15:27:08

## What I built
The Sylar Project is a curated list of mental health resources organized by location. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to find local mental health resources.

### Category Submission: 
Program for the People

### App Link
https://www.sylarproject.com/

### Screenshots
![Sylar Project main page](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ha2yzt7ac7lr5owqzjf9.png)

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/mae0hhmfgg52uzyu44wz.png)

### Description
The Sylar Project in its current form is a curated list of mental health resources in the United States organized by state. Visitors to the site can choose a state from the drop-down menu and view the mental health resources available to them. Additionally, they may also add new resources they feel would fit into the Sylar Project Database. 

### Link to Source Code
https://github.com/Rahat-ch/The_Sylar_Project

### Permissive License
MIT

## Background
During the course of the time, I spent doing mental health talks at conferences as well as on my mental health startup I kept wondering why there isn't a geo-location-based API for mental health resources. I've tried to find something like this but nothing that currently exists does what I want it to do. The goal of this is to eventually have an API exposed where people can bring in mental health resources on their sites or blog posts pertaining to mental health so that their audience can quickly get to those resources as needed. Before getting there, however, this is the first step, getting a list up on The Sylar Project so people can find local resources.

It is very difficult to make the decision to get help when you might need it. There is no reason to let it remain difficult to find resources once you make that decision.

### How I built it 
The technology used in this project is as follows:

Digital Oceans App Platform
Next JS
Tailwind CSS/Tailwind UI
Airtable
Zapier

Digital Oceans App Platform allowed me a no hassle and no configuration needed way of deploying my site. This is the most seamless deployment of a NextJS application I have seen. I really enjoyed combining the low/no-code solutions with code solutions to build this.

DO App Platform is essentially no code for deployment. Airtable for low code database. Zapier for a no-code email notification so I can take a look at what resources someone has tried to add to the database. 

I loved the fact that I was also able to learn github actions while doing this as well to make sure that all tests and builds are passing before any code is merged!

The rest of it is code but I learned this is a great example of combining code and no-code solutions to create a serverless full-stack application. My backend on the NextJS API routes are serverless functions and they also just work on Digital Ocean once Next JS is deployed. 


### Additional Resources/Info
I have fully open-sourced this project and there are a number of contributors already helping to make this even better beyond the current MVP. I welcome anyone who would like to contribute and make The Sylar Project as good as it can be. 

Roadmap Items:
Twitter Bot to Tweet newly approved Resources in each state
Expand to other countries - home page will be replaced with a country selection
Expose an API for other developers to build on top of this platform.