ConnectAH

ConnectAH: the perfect platform for Athena Hacks attendees looking to connect with peers who share their interests/background. Create a personalized profile, find collaborators, and network with ease!

Comment

Inspiration

Our team came together at this weekend's event, brought together by a shared passion for bridging the gender gap in STEM and a desire to connect with like-minded individuals. As we got to know each other, we realized the potential for many others to share our same aspirations and career goals, yet we may never have the opportunity to meet them. This realization inspired us to create a networking platform specifically for this hackathon, providing attendees the chance to connect with others who share their values and passions.

What it does

Connect AH offers a simple and professional login page for new and existing users to access their profiles. Users can easily input their school, major, interests, and graduation year, and write a personalized bio to introduce themselves. With this information, our platform matches you with attendees who share similar interests and backgrounds, providing you with their contact information and introduction to facilitate seamless networking.

How we built it

Our development team utilized a variety of coding languages to create our platform, including Python for backend, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML for front end. To store critical user information such as login credentials, interests, and backgrounds, we leveraged Google's Firebase technology to ensure data security and reliability.

Challenges we ran into

During the development of Connect AH, our team encountered several challenges. One significant obstacle was linking multiple HTML files and constructing a scalable and efficient database using Firebase. Additionally, as novice coders, we had to teach ourselves HTML and CSS in just a few hours, leading to a substantial amount of time spent on debugging. We also ran into several network issues. Despite these challenges, our team remained dedicated and persevered, ultimately producing a satisfactory result.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team takes great pride in our collaborative efforts during the ideation and development phases of Connect AH. Our platform boasts a sleek and intuitive design, seamlessly connecting to a database to provide users with fast and accurate responses based on their inputted information. Overall, we are proud of our successful implementation of these key features and the functionality of the website we built from scratch.

What we learned

Through the process of developing Connect AH, our team gained valuable experience in constructing a website with accurate and efficient connections between HTML files, Python files, and our database. We learned valuable lessons in website development and project management, ultimately contributing to our team's growth and development as professionals.

What's next for Connect AH

Looking ahead, Connect AH is excited to launch a new feature that allows users to provide feedback and ratings for various aspects of the hackathon, including the networking events, workshops, and speakers. Our platform will aggregate this feedback, providing users with valuable insights from other attendees. In addition, we are implementing a simple Jaccard similarity algorithm to help users find like-minded individuals. Moving forward, we hope to explore more advanced matching algorithms, as well as introduce new features such as project theme-based matching, messaging functionality, and the ability to upload photos.

Share this project:

Updates