FindMe

A social networking tool to connect nearby people with similar interests. Bridge social connections with FindMe's location and interest-based introduction.

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Inspiration

It can be difficult to meet new people, especially when everyone is nose down in a mobile device often in public areas. If there were an easy way to chat with a stranger, but to know there was something in common, it would make impromptu friendships and connections natural in a modern environment.

What it does

Users of the app, may turn on the ability to see and be seen in public areas. When two people arrive in relative close proximity of each other, and also have a minimum threshold of similar interests, a "match" occurs. For example, if two people are into Pokemon Go, and speaking Japanese, they will be both be shown each other's profile and a chat dialog becomes available.

How we built it

We used react and react native to build the mobile app, which can be built for iOS, Android, and Web. We have heroku deploying our front end for web as well as the backend. Currently, we are using localhost for testing, but we were able to get auto deploys working for cross team testing. We built the backend to be able to keep track of user positions and manage match conditions. We weren't able to fully test it all in time, but the main code is there.

Challenges we ran into

We added 2 new team mates last minute and started off in the main gym nose down too early. Later we found a classroom with a white board to help sort out tasks and divide roles, but also we narrowed our scope to the basic original idea, as temptations of feature creep set in.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of utilizing a wide skillset in our team. We had two backend engineers working together, a main front end engineer, a devOps engineer working on deployment, and and UX designer working on the Adobe, and Figma designs for logos and wireframes.

We also love the mission of the idea.We also purchased findmeapp.tech.

What we learned

We learned that we should have things like react native already setup on our systems ahead of time as pc configurations in the heat of the moment can be a challenge, especially when mixing systems and technologies. In the future, we will have standard operating procedures for each role, and docker images for dev environments ready to go.

What's next for FindMe

We would like to produce a version ready for private release for early release.

Note: Backend is currently locally hosted so most features will not work in the deployed version. You can build the project yourself locally for full testing. Also adding the domain findmeapp.tech. It may take a day for the name servers to update.

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