Let's Meet

Sometimes finding a time that works for everyone is challenging. Our app makes it easy to plan and choose the best times to meet.

Comment

Inspiration

Many people on our campus use an app called When2Meet to schedule meetings, but their UI is terrible, their features are limited, and overall we thought it could be done better. We brainstormed what would make When2Meet better and thought the biggest thing would be a simple new UI as well as a proper account system to see all the meetings you have.

What it does

Let's Meet is an app that allows people to schedule meetings effortlessly. "Make an account and make scheduling a breeze." A user can create a meeting and share it with others. Then everyone with access can choose which times work best for them.

How we built it

We used a lot of Terraform! We really wanted to go with a serverless microservice architecture on AWS and thus chose to deploy via AWS. Since we were already using lambdas for the backend, it made sense to add Amplify for the frontend, Cognito for logging in, and DynamoDB for data storage. We wrote over 900 lines of Terraform to get our lambdas deployed, api gateway properly configured, permissions correct, and everything else we do in AWS configured. Other than AWS, we utilized React with Ant Design components. Our lambdas ran on Python 3.12.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was a bug with AWS. For roughly 5 hours we fought intermittent 403 responses. Initially we had an authorizer on the API gateway, but after a short time we removed it. We confirmed it was deleting by searching the CLI for it. We double checked in the web console because we thought it may be the authorizer but it wasn't there anyway. This ended up requiring everything to be manually deleted around the API gate way and everything have to be rebuilt. Thanks to Terraform it made restoring everything relatively easy.

Another challenge was using Terraform and AWS itself. We had almost no knowledge of it going in and coming out we know there is so much more to learn, but with these skills we feel confident to set up anything in AWS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud of our deployment and cloud architecture. We think that having built a cloud project of this scale in this time frame is no small feat. Even with some challenges our determination to complete the project helped us get through. We are also proud of our UI as we continue to strengthen our design skills.

What we learned

We learned that implementing Terraform can sometimes be difficult depending on the scope and complexity of the task. This was our first time using a component library for frontend development and we now know how to design, connect, and build an app from start to finish.

What's next for Let's Meet

We would add more features such as syncing the meetings to a Google Calendar. More customizations and features such as location would also be added so that users can communicate where to meet through the web app itself.

Share this project:

Updates