The Genesis of an Idea

Building a simple, useful hub for Catholic young adults in New England.

Map of New England — New England focus (plus NY)

Realizing You’re Not the Only One

One day my second youngest sister texted me an idea: wouldn’t it be cool to have all the Catholic young adult events near you in one place? She was thinking Facebook— I started prototyping a site instead (shoutout to the 100 Days of Python course).

I found catholicyoungadultgroups.org and thought, “Maybe mine isn’t needed.” Then I remembered the Let Them Theory— make your own slant. Mine would focus on New England (where I live), include a calendar, and let users sign up for events to keep in touch afterward.

I sketched in Figma, then built with Flask. Below are basics on the stack and a small code sample.

Sample Model Snippet

I learned to work with Flask databases through SQLAlchemy—starting with SQLite locally and exploring PostgreSQL for production. Flask-Migrate (Alembic) handled schema changes without wiping data.

class Event(db.Model):
    __tablename__ = "event"

    id: Mapped[int] = mapped_column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    title: Mapped[str] = mapped_column(String(120))
    description: Mapped[Optional[str]] = mapped_column(db.Text, nullable=True)
    date_time: Mapped[Optional[datetime]] = mapped_column(DateTime, nullable=True, index=True)

Tools Used

Python (Flask)
Jinja2 templating
SQLAlchemy ORM
SQLite (development)
PostgreSQL (production)
Flask-Migrate (Alembic)
Redis (session storage)
HTML/CSS
JavaScript
Bootstrap 5
OpenAI API
Figma (design)
Fly.io (deployment)
Git & GitHub (version control)

View Website User Instructions (PDF)

View fly.toml