You made what now⁉️

You read it right: Hinder! Hacking meets Tinder.

Unfortunately, we're not a revolutionary dating app to find that special someone for the Y-Combinator afterparty 😿 Instead, we're something even better! 😼

Hinder streamlines the team formation process of hackathons, borrowing inspiration from the simplicity and accessibility of Tinder. Dating apps are pros when it comes to finding who you'd best fit with, so we took a page from their book to help YOU find the perfect hackathon team! We match you with other hackers based on interest, background, and skillset. Seamlessly connect with potential teammates and showcase all of your past experiences, education, skillsets, projects, and more with just a resume and linkedin!

Inspiration

We came to CalHacks with nothing more than the bags on our backs and open minds. It began with casual spit-balling, throwing around word pairs until one crazy combination just stuck: hackathon and tinder.

At first, we didn't know why. But lightning struck when we saw the slack slowly fill up with endless messages, especially team-formation. We realized that so many exceptional hackers were getting lost in the endless flood of people looking for teams, and the sheer magnitude of group requests that each individual would get. Seeing the complications in finding a hacker team, we decided that there is a problem to be explored.

What it does

We decided to combine the streamlined matchmaking system of Tinder with the hackathon team formation problem. Taking the dating app route of matching based on interests, we expanded on this idea to take a more technical approach.

☝️First, hackers can register for an account with an email and password.

✌️Hackers then complete their profile using LinkedIn and their Resume (with the power of some sponsors, check our Tech Spec for more info!) and fill out what they're specifically interested in.

👌Then, hackers match with each other, with matches being done based on similar interests and alignments! Through profile cards, hackers can see each other's experiences, skills, and most importantly, what they're trying to build! From there, they can contact each other and start hacking away!

Challenges we ran into

One of the first challenges we ran into was integrating BrightData with our project. After hearing about BrightData's advanced web scraping tools for LinkedIn, we knew they were PERFECT for our project. Because this was our first time working with their api, it took some tinkering about to put the nuts and bolts together. But the folks over at BrightData have done such an amazing job streamlining things, so it didn't take too long to figure out (shameless plug).
Another challenge was figuring out the wifi situation. Our precious cursor and windsurf were taken down by Big Hotspot, so we frantically had to figure out how get somewhere we could code & crash at overnight. Fortunately, our homies from UC Berkeley came in clutch. Shoutout Caleb Lee, we love you 💖
Yet another challenge was trying to get everything done as a two-man team. Alex and I have been friends coding together since the start of our freshman years, and we decided to go with the dynamic duo for our final CalHacks as undergrads. Sure, having a full team might've gotten us way further, but we decided to go for it for the memories.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming up with an idea by hackers, for hackers. We aim for Hinder to be more than just a submission; we want Hinder to become a tool that makes hacking more accessible and enjoyable. Just as we've received so much from this space, we're thrilled to be giving something back.
And above all else: Building something that we truly love. A lot of the times, we've noticed that it's easy for us to fall into the trap of trying to include every new framework, every new tech stack, and try to build something to fit as many boxes as possible. We took a different approach with this project, and decided to build something fun, and something for the people too. While being on the cutting edge of innovation is always thrilling, we really treasure this project as something special to us.

What we learned

We learned a lot from this project, but our biggest takeaways were learning to assess feasibility, prioritizing simplicity, and the importance of testing.

We learned a lot about proper scope and feasibility assessment. While planning our project, we took the lessons learned from many of our past projects, where we took on massive challenges and scrambled to deliver anything. This time around, we took the approach of assessing our tech stack and setting up realistic timelines to have solid goals rather than good looking ones.
We also learned to focus on producing simple code. Especially with the timeframes of hackathons, it's often easy to get into lots of technical debt and mountains of illegible code. This time around, we focused on keeping integrations clear, and taking the time to set ourselves up for success in the future.
Lastly, we learned the importance of really emphasizing testing, no matter how fast development is. In hackathons past, we often would just ignore testing. But this project really showed us how important it is to take the time to write and perform tests, no-matter how fast we're trying to go. (ok I'll be the first to admit, we say this but we forgot to test most of our code later on. we're only human.)

Tech Spec

Frontend

React: bread & butter
Tailwind CSS: yeah we're trendy like that B)
Next.js: after seeing 50 million ads throughout SF, we caved.

Backend

FastAPI: fast. It's literally in the name
Python: mostly for LLM SDK libraries
Uvicorn: server
BrightData: powerful web-scraping APIs, has a purpose-built LinkedIn profile scraper that we used to great extent
Gemini: used to extract meaningful hacker info from their LinkedIn profile
Claude: used as part of the resume reading system, extracts meaningful hacker info from their resume
ChromaDB: powerful vector database, used primarily to perform similarity checks on user profile vectors
SqLite: the absolute goat. Used for easy to use and lightweight relational databases for user info

What's next for Hinder

Devpost is our north star, our inspiration, our bias. We were really inspired by how Devpost began small, with the intent of being a tool for developers to use. Similarly, we hope that our project is able to really support the hackathon/programming challenge space and eventually becoming a core part of this culture.

But, for steps that we need to take:

Host it: bringing Hinder to life! our first step of action would be to actually host Hinder, and to see how it would work with our first few users.
User feedback, live tests: taking Hinder into the wild! By taking Hinder to hackathons, CTFs, or other competitions, we can start collecting live feedback and user opinions, and whether or not this would be something beneficial for the hackathon space.
Prepare to scale: Hinder is currently not optimized for public use and is just currently where it needs to be at for a proof of concept. Our next steps would be to transition it into being able to serve hundreds of users, and preparing for the challenges that would come with it.