Inspiration
The theme of this hackathon was celebrating community, and what better way to celebrate community than helping build new ones! Our team had recounted experiences during our first semester of college where we were new to the environment and didn't know anybody. We were nervous to go to different events because we never had anyone to go with. So, our team created a website where you could be matched with someone before going to an event in an effort to increase turnout, create friendships, and foster community. Many diversity-focused clubs like W@CC can be intimidating to attend alone for the first time, but our app aims to help bridge this gap and encourage a greater sense of community.
What it does
Our app aims to help increase community engagement by connecting like minded people interested in attending the same event. Users are able to create a profile on the web app, allowing them to share their interests, classes and org affiliations. This information is used to find other similar users who are similar. Users can choose events they are interested in and be matched with someone else who is also interested in going, who will be a familiar face at the event and open to meeting them.
How we built it
The website was built with a React frontend and a Python Flask API that is connected to a Google Firebase realtime database. We began by first creating an extensive Figma prototype to determine the look and basic features of the website. We then divided into two teams, a frontend and backend team that split the work. We used Github to combine all of our contributions into a final product.
Challenges we ran into
We encountered many bugs and issues with github, but we were able to use our online resources to correct these bugs. Furthermore, there were difficulties with getting images to show up in the website, but we troubleshooted that and solved it by moving our images to a public folder rather than keeping each one in the folder designated to its page.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It was many of our team member’s first exposure to Git, Javascript and Flask. They worked hard to quickly learn how to use the languages and libraries and we were able to put together a very solid final product that we are all proud of.
What we learned
We learned how to code a website using JavaScript, CSS, and React. Using previous knowledge, we built on that and learned how to connect different pages, change the color of buttons depending on the position of the cursor, and how to insert images into our website. We also gained a better understanding of git because we had to use github for the project.
What's next for LinkChain
Since we didn’t have a lot of time to implement our ideas, we focused on creating the core features of LinkChain during this hackathon. In the future, we hope that users will be able to browse through other users with similar interests to them. This was one of the screens we created in the Figma mockup but we weren’t able to implement it in the end due to time constraints. It would also be really cool to add an AI matching algorithm to this project, since that would allow us to better pair up the most compatible users.
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