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Inspiration

Everyone in this team has previously been to post-secondary and noticed that their large group of friends have been slowly dwindling since graduation, especially after COVID. It's already well known that once you leave school it's a lot harder to make friends, so we got this idea to make FriendFinder to match you with people with similar hobbies in the same neighbourhood as you.

What it does

Find friends!

When making an account on FriendFinder, you will be asked to input your hobbies, whether you prefer chatting or hanging out, whether you enjoy outdoor activities or not, and your neighbourhood. It then gives other users a relative score based on your profile, with more matching hobbies and preferences having a higher score. Now when ever you log in, the front page will show you a list of people near you with the highest score, allowing you to send them friend requests to start a chat.

How we built it

With friends!

We used HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the frontend and Firebase and Firestore for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Our friends...

Just kidding. One of the biggest challenges we faced was the short amount of time (24 hours) of this hackathon. Being first year students, we made a project of similar scale in school but over 4 months! Another challenge was that none of us knew how to implement a real time chat app into our project. At first we wanted to learn a new language React and make the chat app beautiful, but due to time constraints, we researched a simpler way to do it just to give it base functionality.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our friendship survived!

After the initial scramble to figure out what we were doing, we managed to get a minimum viable product in 24 hours. We are really proud that we incorporated our knowledge from school and learned something new and integrated it together without any major issues.

What we learned

Make good friends

The most important thing we learned is that team work is one of the most important things needed for a good development team. Being able to communicate with your team and dividing work up by each team member's strengths is what made it possible to finish this project within the strict time limit. The hackathon was a really fun experience and we're really glad that we could form a team together.