MeetKat

Making friends as an adult feels like a sidequest with no quest marker. Most apps for meeting people are built for dating. The friendship ones stop at "you matched!", and then everyone types "we should hang out sometime" and never does. We wanted the opposite: an app that gets you from "you both like board games" to "Saturday, 2pm, board game café."

The name comes from meerkats. They're social animals, and a group of meerkats is called a mob. Finding your mob shouldn't be left to chance.

Meetkat helps adults (18+) find platonic friends and actually hang out with them.

Discover: people are ranked by shared interests, friendship goals, campus and free time, and every match shows why ("You both like coding and cafés, you're both free Tuesday afternoons"). No AI decides who you see. AI conversation starters: Google Gemini writes an opener and an activity idea from only what two people have in common. Never names, photos or messages. It's opt-in, and both people have to say yes. Plan a hangout: pick friends or a group and Meetkat calculates the times everyone is actually free. Your classes and shifts stay private: friends only ever see when you're free, never why you're busy. Gemini then picks the best time and suggests something to do, but it can only choose from times that really work. Import your schedule: type it in, upload a calendar file, or let Gemini read a photo of your timetable. You review everything before it's saved, and the file is never kept. Meet halfway: an approximate halfway point between friends, with nobody's exact location shared. Groups, events and memories: join groups, RSVP to events, and post memories that only your friends see by default. Screen-time groups: set a daily goal with friends and keep each other honest about touching grass. Safety: blocking, reporting and a moderators' area, with private-by-default settings enforced on the server.

Website: Next.js, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, with a design and logo built around brown, blue and cream. Backend: Python with FastAPI and a PostgreSQL database. AI: Google Gemini with structured JSON output. Every answer is checked against a schema, cached, and replaced by a clearly labelled non-AI suggestion if Gemini is unavailable. Hosting: live at meetkat.us on a Vultr server, with automatic HTTPS through Caddy. Testing: 273 automated API tests, a 39-step browser test that clicks through the whole app like a real user, and a 56-check end-to-end API test. We used Claude Code as an AI pair programmer throughout. Scheduling is harder than it looks: time zones, overnight shifts, buffer time between classes, and keeping everyone's private schedule private while still finding shared free time. Privacy surprises: we realized that with only two people, a precise halfway point would let you work out roughly where your friend lives. We now round it so that can't happen. Keeping AI honest: Gemini sometimes wrote "meet during S2" (our internal time code) instead of real times. We tightened the prompt and made the server swap in the real time. Deployment: server setup, DNS, HTTPS, a mysterious "502 error" in GitHub Codespaces (it turned out to be oversized login cookies), and a build cache that kept serving our old colours after a full rebrand. It's live and fully working at meetkat.us, with a one-click demo account. AI that's actually useful, but always opt-in, clearly labelled, and never fed personal details. Privacy by design: your schedule, location and contact details are never shown to other people. A whole rebrand mid-hackathon: new name, logo, colours and voice. Real testing: hundreds of automated checks, not just "it worked on my laptop." AI works best on top of exact logic, not instead of it. The free-time maths is precise; Gemini adds the personality. Privacy isn't a setting you add at the end. It shaped almost every feature decision. Getting something live (DNS, HTTPS, servers) is its own sidequest. Honest error messages beat fake ones. If a feature isn't available, the app says so. Email and phone verification, and password reset by email, once we connect an email and SMS provider. A mobile app, so screen-time groups can use real phone screen time instead of numbers people type in. Real place suggestions near the halfway point, using Google Maps. Launching with student groups on campus, plus a legal review of our Terms and Privacy Policy before real users.

https://www.loom.com/share/f2d16ac66b37487e8aea5fc927eae955 DEMOLINK WE COULDNT FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET IT TO YOUTUBE