Mingl | Devpost

Final version!
Our first prototype

Inspiration

We wanted to make something that would allow people to meet others in their local community to get together to do things. We felt something like this would be beneficial in helping grow a togetherness within a local community.

We felt this would tool would shine in two use cases:

Shy, busy, and/or lonely folks who may want to, for example, watch a movie but don't want to go alone.
Help organize and/or advertise big events being held in a community such as park clean-ups, down-town local business/restaurant crawls, fairs or charity runs.

What it does

A user posts an event they want people to participate, they give a title, description, location, and a time. Users can look for upcoming events around them to attend.

How we built it

We used express.js and node.js to build a web server that would handle serving our requests and would handle communicating with our database (Mongodb). We set up a few API endpoints to handle creating and getting events and to manage user login. As part of the user login we used Google's auth api. We set up our node.js server in a docker container and deployed that to Google's Kubernetes engine.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had much experience with mongodb. Good docs and time got us through. In the end we were happy with our choice to use it, but it was a bit of a learning curve.
Trivial bugs (misspellings tripped up our tired minds)
DNS + SSL (It was too much for us!)