Durmegle

Inspiration

From the theme of “breaking boundaries”, our team decided that a large boundary in the current circumstances was the lack of social interaction between households and colleges. It has been quite lonely especially as we are new to this city and have done a few weeks of isolation and lockdown, we have had very limited opportunities to talk to people outside of our bubble. Additionally, we realised this could be extended to a way of finding your ideal housemates for second year. Hence, we wanted to create an app that would break these boundaries between us all and give us the opportunity to communicate with one another!

What it does

The web application that we have created matches people together from across the university based on their interests. Once the algorithm has found the best suited friend, it shows you their name, email address and the top 3 interests that you share. You can then click a button and get talking!

How we built it

We split the project into two teams - one working on the front-end website development and one working on the back-end friend-finding algorithm. The app works by taking a name and email address from the user and asking them to rank interests from 1 to 5 for varying categories and activities. These rankings are then compared to other users’ information and the user with the most similar interests is found and returned. The most similar user is found by calculating the sum of the absolute value of the differences between the scores of each interest. The user with the smallest difference is the most similar.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several challenges along the journey, but as a team, we were able to work together, help each other and find a solution. The first big challenge was the task of effectively dividing the workload across the team as we all had varying programming experience. On a more technical side of things, we faced great difficulty integrating the python friend-finding algorithm into the HTML webpage. Furthermore, we had issues with communication over zoom since one team member was in a different college.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given the short time scale of this project, we learnt how to work together as a team and utilise our key strengths to come together and build a project under the time pressure.

What we learned

We learnt and develop many skills, in particular, manipulating files and integrating python scripts into HTML pages.

What's next for Durmegle

We want to develop this further and look a secure way of storing interests and emails to comply with GDPR laws. We would also like to build a chat bot that will allow you to connect and talk more.

Built With

• bootstrap
• cgi
• css
• databases
• html
• javascript
• python
• text