DubConnects

Inspiration

We were initially inspired by Omegle and how it offers a great, interactive way to connect with new people. As college freshman students recently coming out of the pandemic, we hold a lot of interest in connecting with new people. We were inspired by Omegle, but we also wanted to improve upon it. Omegle is a powerful platform, but at the same time, it has its flaws. It's virtually impossible to regulate misuse by select individuals. Looking to create a product without these flaws, we were inspired to create a way to connect with others just in UW, so our product validates UW emails prior to joining calls and utilizes powerful video chat APIs like the video chatroom API supplied by Twilio.

What it does

DubConnects is a website where users must first enter their UW emails. If the user enters a valid UW email, then they'll have to also verify it. This guarantees that anyone who does join a room is affiliated with UW. Once users are verified, they are placed into a room with one other user - rooms have two total slots for users. If all rooms are full, then a new room is created and the user is sent there. The rooms allow for one-on-one communication without any distracting buttons and gimmicks to let true connections form naturally.

How we built it

We built our project by using React.js for frontend, Spring Boot for backend, and Twilio chatroom/video/audio APIs which are built on top of WebRTC. We utilized REST APIs and deployed our website using Azure App Services. We also used GitHub to collaborate and maintain version control.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into multiple challenges and worked tirelessly through the night to build our product. Coming into DubHacks, we were unfamiliar with most of the frameworks and APIs we wanted to use. We spent a considerable amount of time learning about these frameworks and APIs until we felt confident enough to begin creating our project. Even then, we ran into roadblocks. During development, we struggled with issues that ranged from small mistakes in syntax to program crashing errors. We were only able to build a working version because of our ability to work collaboratively as a team as well as our relentless commitment to our product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to complete an MVP within one day, working through several roadblocks and learning new tools and APIs over the course of the journey. In particular, our successes when working with the Twilio APIs were especially rewarding because we were able to discover first-hand how powerful and essential Twilio's APIs really are.

What we learned

We learned that a growth mindset and a positive attitude are very important. Creating an MVP in one day seemed insurmountable at first, but by willingly learning, adapting, and collaborating with one another, we were able to build an MVP that we didn't think we were able to build initially.

What's next for DubConnects

We want to create other products like DubConnects that would provide the same services to other schools around the nation. We believe that our platform and our idea can help establish stronger communities within schools, which is especially important now because of the social interactions and connections that were lost due to the pandemic. Furthermore, we would like to expand our product's functionalities by adding social games and interactive elements to help break the ice during one-on-one conversations.