Jalo

Many nights pass by without any plans. It isn't lack of friends, it is lack of communication. Jalo provides a convenient way to coordinate friends around specific plans and let anyone say "I'm in".

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Inspiration

Arriving into new places always means starting all over again, including with friends and socializing. It was one lonely night when I had the idea to do something, but didn't ask anyone thinking they would be busy. Turns out they were thinking the same way too! We needed a way to communicate effectively and gather plans based on what we are up to doing, while reconnecting with some old friends in the process.

What it does

You log in with Facebook and the app gets your friend connections who are also registered in the app. At any point you can set up a plan you want to do, maybe going for dinner at that new place, or hiking around the mountains near town. Maybe you will spend the night home and someone might want to hop in, or even you could schedule your gaming or streaming sessions for others to join you in your plan. Maybe you don't know exactly what you want to do. Well, the inverse is also applied, you can hop in into the app and see the plans your friends have for a specific time. Just go into their post and tell them "I'm in"

How we built it

In order to get the open access possible in a short ammount of time we implemented this as a Web Page using the MERN stack. Mongo, Express React and Node. This helps us build and deliver fast while also retaining most of the control over the control of our app. For this project in particular we tried an interesting approach in the file ordering system, emmulating the PODS system used in some frameworks or languages like Ember. This helps us group our code by entitied and also divide the workflow efficiently.

Challenges we ran into

Because we are using the info from Facebook we frequently run into the problem and design decision of whether to cache the information or keep it flowing to maintain it updated. We want the user data to be always fresh, but this comes at a cost of multiple repeated fetches that we don't want to push into our clients. We ended up running with a mix of both, keeping the constant queries but optimizing our flow to do the least of them as possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The system in which the user friends are gathered for social communication depends heavily on the flow of the Facebook API, this was the most difficult thing to gather, especially ensuring a smooth onboarding experience in which the user would both login seamlessly with their social network, while at the same time we make all the preparations necessary for the user model to start using the app. It's kind of like a magic trick, and we learned how to juggle our cards on this one.

What we learned

Returning to our fresh data problem, we realized the importance of determining earlier on when to normalize or not our data, seeing the tradeoffs this bring and when to use which one. Many times we rearranged code because we saw a more efficient way to build it. Knowing this from the beginning will save a lot of time in the next hackathons.

What's next for Jalo

Make it big!! The basic functionality is already there but we can always improve upon it. By selecting which friends are going to be the ones invited to the events, setting filters and different functionalities like a specific date for responding, etc. Improving the chat is also necessary. But after all of that, make our friends use it and continue scaling it and see what more it needs to grow!

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