Inspiration
As freshmen in college, all three of us faced the difficulty of making new friends in large lectures. Classes with two hundred and three hundred people (and 1400 people in an introductory CS class) are intimidating. Finding study partners in these large classes takes more courage than one would admit. We decided to solve this problem with simplicity and elegance. By building a directory of the class, students can network and create study groups at their own leisure with speed; the class is at their fingertips.
What it does
plsfind.me is a website where students can add themselves to classes and quick and easily search through the database for students in the same class. Students provide their email and a small biography describing their major, how many people they like studying with, etc.
How we built it
Django was used to handle the serverside processing, and the web app is hosted on Heroku. We used the Bootstrap web framework to build the front-end.
Challenges we ran into
- 2/3 of us had no prior experience in web development, so learning HTML5, Javascript, CSS, and using Bootstrap to build a website took quite some time.
- First time working with Heroku - Django took four hours to set up on Heroku. Broke python's symlinks at some point in time, and had to do a fresh reinstall.
- Our first idea failed when we found out we didn't have an HDMI to DVI-D cable for the Raspberry Pi, so we effectively had less than 1 day to finish this hack.
Accomplishments that we are proud of
We are proud of quickly learning and using these languages and skills to create a working website site.
What we learned
We learned Javascript, HTML5, CSS, and how to use these languages to create the front-end of a website. We also learned how to deploy a Django project to Heroku, and the importance of testing locally (it's much more efficient).
What's next for plsfind.me
We plan to publish this site, and start implementing changes and more features which would help students in large lectures connect and learn from each other. We will also streamline the input process, by using an auto-complete search for entering the university.
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