About
We created Flamingo during MasseyHacks, the largest hackathon in Canada for high school students in Windsor, Ontario. Our hack provides attendees of a conference or a hackathon to easily connect with each other on platforms like LinkedIn in a much more efficient way. Also check out our website https://flamingoapp-org.github.io/flamingo/
Inspiration
As extremely passionate high school students who aspire to become members of the tech community, we often find ourselves going to places like hackathons and conferences to explore, gain more knowledge and network! However, during many conferences, we find it a bit too hard to find individuals that have similar interests that we can speak to. We decided that this hackathon was the perfect place to create a hack that could potentially solve parts of this problem.
What it does
Flamingo essentially tracks your location in the background which will help it to identify whether you are currently at an event like a hackathon or a conference. You will then receive a notification which you can click on to confirm that you are actually attending that specific event. After confirmation, you'll be sent over to a page where you can see everyone else in the room that has a LinkedIn account, and from there you can choose to connect with them, send them a message, etc. Another great feature is connection through bluetooth which saves a lot of time since you won't be required to type in someone's name or search several pages of LinkedIn to find them.
How we built it
The process of building the app was definitely the most fun thing that we did today. We used Objective-C to build the app and used APIs from LinkedIn while we were building the app. We also built a website using HTML, CSS and JS which was a lot of fun as well.
Challenges we ran into
Integrating the API from LinkedIn was extremely challenging at first and it got a bit frustrating since we couldn't figure it out for almost half an hour, however, we finally managed to figure this out and moved on with the rest of the app.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're really proud that we managed to build a fully functional iOS app in under 24 hours along with a beautifully designed website. We're also proud for being the youngest team to rank in the top 5 and get the opportunity to present our demo in front of everyone.
What we learned
We learned and exercised many of our skills ranging from UI Design to coding with Apple's language, Swift.
What's next for Flamingo
We hope to continue working on Flamingo and making some changes that could make it better and maybe expanded it to have some more capabilities. We're also planning on meeting some members of the LinkedIn team to get their input on the app, which will definitely be some valuable feedback.
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