Inspiration: Dhruv was driving from Chicago and relying on facebook to find other participants from his area, but unfortunately there was no way for him to find that information on facebook, given all the inaccuracy in the people who reported they were going, so we decided to create a tool to help people find others who've been confirmed to the hackathon.
What it does The web app interfaces with a server which stores the information of all confirmed hackers. The hackers can then log in and give their location (as a city) and find other hackers near them.
How we built it: We used a flask development environment and a mysql server on my computer, connecting them using the py-mysql library.
Challenges we ran into: We ran into alot of challenges. We had to learn flask and learn how to use processes in SQL. We also had other ideas that we tried to run with, like using machine learning to tell people events they might be interested in and creating objects with polymer, but we couldn't get those to work given the time constraints. Learning all these technologies was a huge challenge.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: Finally getting the server-front-end interface to work!!!
What we learned: That it's important to focus on a few things that you can implement well, rather than trying different things that are all just related to the main project, without knowing the main project will work.
What's next for Hacker-Matcher: Integrating machine-learning and the facebook-api to handle the user's login credentials and find out their basic interests and information for machine-learning. Also integrating the google maps API.
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