Last week I got an opportunity to attend the Women's Leadership Summit 2023 hosted at RIT and the theme was "Be the future you want". One of the many quotes that stuck with me that day was what the Keynote speaker JoAnne Ryan said: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." That's what Find buddy is based on, together we can go far. It is also based on the body-doubling technique for better productivity where you find an accountability partner to work alongside to help accomplish your tasks.
The user searches for a buddy for a particular activity - Study buddy, Shopping trip, hobby. Based on a user's preferences it comes up with a list of people who could be potential buddies for this activity. After that, if you click on the right button you are also accepting them as potential buddies. If you select the left button, they are someone you don't want to work with and won't show up again. If both users chose each other they are matched, at this point they can choose to connect with each other and share their phone or meeting info to get started on the task.
This project is prototyped in canva and we are working on the website model using ASP.NET core with C# and SQL Server. To better present the idea we thought it best to prototype it. We wanted to design it well, so we spent a lot of time coming up with use cases and the algorithm for matching buddies. For matching two people we look at their preferences and return a list of people who would be ranked by their cosine similarity. Ideally, anything above 66% percent is a good potential match.
The challenges we ran into were choosing the technology, learning new technologies, using GitHub for team collaboration, and coming up with mock data for which we ended up using mockaroo to create dummy data that we could load into our database. In 24 hours we created a prototype (which we refined in several rounds), set up the initial database, and started with the development of the front end & back end for the application. Future goals include shifting to a mobile app, integrating with the cloud and dynamically updating the matches list as we find more people and making it LIVE after thorough testing.
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