HobbyHub

An application that can help find a new hobby for you, and match you up with people that are also interested in learning that hobby!

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Inspiration

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we unfortunately have all been stuck in our homes. Finding new things to do and meeting new people has become increasingly difficult for many people all around the world. We were very inspired by this situation because there are a surprising amount of things everyone can do while at home. We want to encourage people to try out those things while also being able to meet new people who have a similar personality,

What it does

This application asks the user various personality-type questions, and from their responses our k-means algorithm (a machine-learning algorithm) recommends the best hobby for them to try. We also provide them with contact information from users who were also suggested that hobby, so that you may connect with each other. Naturally, these suggested users will have similar interests/ personality types to you, as our algorithm determines the most well suited hobby via personality-type questions.

How I built it

We built the web application using the React library, and we store the user's data (their name and email address) into Firebase. The app was deployed via Netlify, and the domain name was gotten from Domain.com.

Challenges I ran into

We all ran into a number of issues throughout this hackathon. One of the biggest issues, was planning all of our ideas around a particular API and then realizing that integrating this particular API was not going to work the way we wanted. In addition, all of us are relatively new to using the React library, so we encountered some issues using it at first considering how different it is from traditional HTML and JavaScript. We also had issues with displaying data from Firebase, as collecting data from a database is not instantaneous which we initially did not take into account when using the database.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very proud that we built a working web application within the time given, and were also able to successfully deploy it with a custom domain name. We are also proud of the fact that our web application helps users connect with others, which is a major issue caused by the pandemic.

What I learned

We learned a lot about databases and React in such a short amount of time. Time management was also a large factor in development as we have all learned. We made sure to set ideal goals as it's important to be realistic on what you can create in a maximum time of 36 hours. Nonetheless, we learned some really cool HTML and CSS tricks which we'll definitely consider using when we make another web app sometime in the future!

What's next for HobbyHub

While connecting user's within our database is great, we also believe that we could connect user's with people outside of our own database who have experience with the user's hobby.. That way, they can reach out to people proficient with that hobby. We were also thinking of integrating different social medias into our web app so that it'll become an even larger platform for our users. Furthermore, adding features that connect people by their age, location, interests, etc. will definitely help match users more accurately, so we will definitely keep that in mind.

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