Inspiration
Before the pandemic, Bruin Daily (our school’s news organization) published an article stating that as many as 30% of students feel isolated, having trouble making connections with others. Then came Coronavirus. Millions of us have been compelled to shelter in place during one of the worst viral outbreaks in recent history. Recently, we have begun to see alarming upward trends in depression cases across the globe as the virus exacerbates an already crucial problem. We’re now approaching the tenth month with no clear end in sight, and while healthcare workers work tirelessly around the clock to maintain our physical health, much less has been done to target the isolation pandemic that has come alongside covid.
As students that have felt this isolation first-hand before the pandemic, and especially now during the quarantine, we wanted to address this issue. We created Dinner for 4 Strangers as a way for like-minded people around the globe to connect in a virtual setting and share their experiences with one another. Despite the name, Dinner for 4 Strangers is an app meant for spontaneous meetings with strangers at any time and anywhere. With the power of virtual meetings, genuine connections can be made despite current events keeping us indoors.
Moving forward, we had 2 main goals. First, we wanted to foster more genuine and novel social interactions. Second, we wanted to make the experience as smooth and as organic as possible. Meeting strangers is daunting enough, doubly so online.
What it does
We created a video calling platform that matches individuals into personal group calls in real time. Our platform matches individuals by their shared interests to create an immediate connection between them. Once matched, our app provides users with prompts in the form of icebreaker questions, which help to inspire or guide these conversations. Users are then free to take their conversations in whichever direction they choose, with the goal of making meaningful connections.
How I built it
Frontend
We built our frontend primarily in ReasonML, specifically ReasonReact. ReasonML is a language syntax on top of Ocaml that compiles into Javascript. For styling, we mainly relied on TailwindCSS, which offers many low-level utility classes that we can use to speed development.
Backend
We built our backend in the Elixir language using the Phoenix web framework. We used the daily.co live video chat services in order to implement live video calls.
Challenges I ran into
As shown in the previous section, we opted for some nontraditional technologies to implement our project. While this is not the first time we’ve used these technologies, we’ve only recently picked them up and there is a lot that needs to be learned as we go. Because these languages are not currently popular, if we ran into an issue, it was difficult to find support online. This led to a lot of self-investigation and deep-diving that would generally not be required with more popular techs like Django.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Live video conferencing turned out to be no easy task, and we are proud that we were able to implement the video call functionality. We ran into many hurdles along the way, but were able to scrape a working solution together just in time.
What I learned
In this hackathon, our team learned how to streamline the app-making process. Rather than waiting on our UI designer to finish designs, we learned ways to keep everyone busy to minimize bottlenecks. For example, our designer initially created wireframes so that we can setup the general structure of the frontend and backend while finer decisions such as the color palette could be worked on in parallel.
We also learned many new technical skills that we can use for future projects. For example, we delved into the inner weeds of Tailwind, creating custom utilities to serve our purposes where Tailwind’s default were lacking.
What's next for Dinner for 4 Strangers
We would like to take Dinner for 4 Strangers further by fleshing out the design and then promoting the product to a wider audience. We think there is also room for video optimization to improve performance, as well as some additional features like custom conversation cards. Overall, we have a lot of ideas we want to implement and we’re excited to see where we can take Dinner for 4 Strangers!
Built With
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