Clubbo

An easy way to see the clubs at your college

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Inspiration

There are hundreds of clubs at every college, which makes it hard for students to keep track of events coming up or find new clubs they are interested in. At our college, this is an especially big problem since students have to "comp", or apply for, clubs they want to join. We wanted an easier way to find out what big events are coming up, see what clubs our friends are in, and find out how/where to join new clubs.

What it does

Clubbo shows a feed of events, from clubs you are in and featured clubs, for you to see and mark as "going". Your account is linked to facebook, so when you pull up a club or event, you can see which of your friends are involved with that club/event. It also links you to your university through your @school.edu email address. You can add clubs you manage as a student, and once you manage a club, you can add events for it that are either public to your college or private to just your club members.

How we built it

We started with a Ruby on Rails backend powered with a Postgres DB on Heroku. While working on the backend, we also started mockups for our final design. Facebook Login is used on iOS for user authentication. Facebook's Graph API is used to build friendships in our relational database. Alamofire and SwiftyJSON are used to handle networking on iOS.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we had was only having two apple computers for three developers, which slowed progress on the ios code. We also hit a period of time where we weren't sure how to link tables in ruby on rails, so we had to pause progress to learn about that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our link to facebook. A user can log in using facebook and the app automatically populates their friends. We are also proud of our progress in ios, since for most of us this is our first hackathon and first ios app.

What we learned

We learned that the backend of an app takes longer to figure out than it does to code, so we should spend more time considering every link we will need and how to create those links before designing the rest of the app. We also learned more about how to code in ruby on rails and ios, and the steps required to bring an app to life.

What's next for Clubbo

Hopefully we can continue working on our app so it gets closer to our original mock up ideal, rather than the simpler version we were able to accomplish during the time of this hackathon.

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