BeerUp!

Creating more Cheers, Chats, and Connections.

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Domain: Beerup.tech

Inspiration

For more than two thousand years it has been the drink of choice for everyday, working-class people. If anything, then, beer symbolizes the virtues of ordinary, day-to-day life: friendship, loyalty, and unpretentiousness.

With the return to the office, most people are networking in the evenings. Bars are casual environments where people are more relaxed and open to conversation. All of these are situations where people who would otherwise never meet are encouraged to talk, and beer (or any drink of choice) plays a significant role in those interactions. Beer in this case is a symbolic representation of what we wanted to replicate, in a virtual environment to encourage safe interactions as pandemic protocols continue.

Demographics: All Ages. 80% of professionals find networking essential to their career success, almost 100% believe that face-to-face meetings build stronger long-term relationships, and 41% want to network more often Networking is vital for those who want to move up in their career. According to HubSpot, 85% of jobs are filled through networking. In fact, according to CNBC, 70% of jobs are never published publicly.

Beer was not invented but discovered. Its discovery was inevitable once the gathering of wild grains became widespread after the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 BCE, in a region known as the Fertile Crescent. Whether in stone-age villages, Mesopotamian banqueting halls, or modern pubs and bars, beer has brought people together since the dawn of civilization. Now, we want to help people discover their interests, learn from others, and reinvent themselves. (Beer optional!)

What it does

Create Safe spaces for discussion Connect users together on video call on the website based on the community they want to join Enable users to access ressources Users can invite others to join through email

How we built it

Authentication: CockroackDB as a database to store user information. Video calling: WebRTC for a low latency peer-to-peer video calling connection. We also implemented socket.io to create the room call joining features where multiple users can join at the same time Video recording: We used the MediaStream recording API to trigger the screen recording from user browser to record the video Send Invitation: We used Twilio SendGrid to invite people to join the session. Frontend: We designed the UI/UX using Figma. After getting the final sketch, we used React, HTML, CSS to build the website and create complicated interactive features. Backend: We used Express, Node.js, and SQL for cockroachDB to build a server and host it in Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

Since our project was quite challenging, some of our members were forced to learn frontend technologies and style the website similar to our Figma, which was quite new to use and difficult. However, regardless of these challenges, we were able to pull through as we had a long- full-day zoom meeting where we spent them on debugging sessions and then finally have a working product in the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of what we were able to do in such short time.

What we learned

WebRTC, front end and backend, APIS

What's next for BeerUp

Adding more features!

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