HackTeamFinder

Inspiration

We were a rag‑tag bunch of first‑timers who showed up at the check‑in desk without a single teammate in sight. After half an hour of awkwardly wandering the venue, we realized the hardest part of a hackathon often isn’t shipping code—it’s finding the right people to ship it with. That shared frustration lit the spark for Hackify: a dead‑simple way to meet collaborators before the opening keynote is even over.

What it does

Hackify is a matchmaking app for hackathons. You create a quick profile with your skills, interests, and availability, then swipe through potential teammates. When two people swipe right on each other — boom! It's a match. You can chat, sync up your ideas, and start building.

It’s designed to be fast, low-friction, and hyper-focused on hackathon vibes.

How we built it

We built Hackify using:

Frontend: React Native (so we could target both iOS and Android quickly)

Backend: Python and Mongodb

UI Design: Figma, plus a lot of late-night pixel-pushing

We focused on shipping a functional MVP in a short time window — swipe UI, match system, and chat — while keeping things clean and intuitive.

Challenges we ran into

Scope Creep vs. Reality: Our Trello board had 27 “nice‑to‑haves” on day 1; we shipped 8. Learning to say “later” saved the project.
Mobile Auth Pain: Deep‑linking between email verification, OAuth, and Expo Go dev builds caused an embarrassing number of 401s at 3 a.m.
Chat at Scale (Even Small Scale): WebSockets love to break exactly when the judges arrive—retry logic and exponential backoff became our best friends.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working swipe-to-match system in under 48 hours Created a polished UI that other hackers actually wanted to use Implemented a chat feature to help build connections with matches

What we learned

User friction is real — if it takes more than a minute to onboard, people bounce Real-time features (like chat and presence) are deceptively tricky Building for people, not just users, leads to better design decisions