FaceToFace

Content-driven lifestyles absorb people away from in-person interactions. Our goal is to leverage technology to lower the barrier of scheduling, in turn enabling more meaningful physical meetings.

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Inspiration

Modern calendar applications are frequently used to manage, track, and store an individual's schedule(s); however, there is a proper system to link schedules amongst friends, making it a hassle to coordinate shared events with one another.

What it does

Our application allows users to coordinate events with friends by allowing them to upload personal .ics files from modern calendar applications (ex. Google Calendar). Users can register for accounts and add friends to access their availabilities and schedule (in-person) meetings. Additionally, users can be recommended events based on their preferences and their (stored) meeting history.

How we built it

We created a Next.js 13 application, using Tailwind to style our webpage. We integrated CockroachDB using the Prisma ORM to manage user administration (register, login). To both find available meeting times and recommend potential events between users, we queried the users' event and meeting history and sent it to TogetherAI's

Challenges we ran into

We ran into various issues in setting up the CockroachDB database using the Prisma ORM, as our groupmates only had experience with nonrelational database management systems (ex. MongoDB). A lack of documentation for the new Next.js 13 with our technologies combined with a need to translate and parse .ics files and unfamiliarity with TogetherAI's API, caused many roadblocks along the way to our final project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to implement all of the features that we originally planned, resulting in a minimum viable product that highlights our projects' main premises. We had a discouraging slow start to project development, so we're all extremely proud of our turnaround in creating a functional web application with previously foreign technologies.

What we learned

The greatest takeaway for our group was the importance of technology documentation. A lot of our early struggles were eventually solved once we understood the documentation, leading to lots of time wasting that could have been avoided.

What's next for FaceToFace

We'd like to implement more direct connections to modern calendar applications, specifically Google Calendar, given the availability of Google Calendar's API. Additionally, we'd like to rework the application's UI, creating a more visually appealing interface for users to streamline their schedules around.

Built With

  • cockroachdb
  • next.js
  • prisma
  • tailwind
  • togetherai
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