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Website Homepage
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Account Creation
Inspiration
When I arrived at RIT, I was very excited to meet with others, and make things, do things. I wanted to build huge projects. This requires talent and help from other people, who are out there, but hard to reach. Classes don't facilitate meeting different areas of expertise, and clubs have a similar issue. If I wanted a website and I'm a game design major, I wouldn't know where to look. I needed a matchmaking service for ideas and talent, focused on college-level projects.
What it does
RIT GroupUs is exactly that. It allows users to submit ideas they have, and what skills will be needed to follow through on that idea. Users can then look at posted ideas, and contact idea posters about contributing. If the idea owner thinks they're a fit, they can send an invite, and the talent can accept the invite to be added as a contributor.
How we built it
Our website backend was made using Flask, and all rendering is done server-side using jinja2 templates. Our database is PostgreSQL, and we use SQLAlchemy to interact with our database. We used SocketIO for the real-time communication when people are chatting with each other. When everything was said and done, we Dockerized our application and are now hosting it on a cloud provider called Railway under rit-group.us
Challenges we ran into
Our main challenge was the massive scope of the project. Everything had to work seamlessly together, and there are so many moving parts. The most difficult problem was the database, since we ended up using SQLAlchemy 2.0, which we have no experience with. Re-learning it was challenging, but the tool is still very powerful.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We really like our messaging system, as we had to setup Rooms, Messages, and all of those database entries were linked to Invites, Ideas, Users, etc. Everything ties together and flows nicely, which was no accident.
What we learned
Over 1400 lines of code was ambitious, but just barely doable in 25 hours (with a 4 hour sleep period). We gained a lot of familiarity with the Flask stack, it was interesting and nice to see how easily Flask packages worked with Flask.
What's next for GroupUs
Launch for campuses statewide, and add more settings for creating ideas. Plus we want to add filters for filtering ideas by your roles. The more UI and UX improvements we could make, the better (like mobile support).
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