linkup

Lonely college students finally have an easy way to meet people on campus!

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Inspiration

We've all been in the same place as college students, having no time to find time to meet up with people, no one's free the same time you are, and you're trouble finding friends to hang out with. This app solves all of that, by setting up a meeting with a random person on campus every week!

What it does

You sign up, put in your availability, and watch the magic happen as your college social life turns around! You can run it locally with npm run web.

How we built it

We wanted to focus on a mobile app, so we went with a derivative of React Native - Expo - and used Supabase for the database. We built the server that hosts the Websocket and the API with Express, supabase ORM, and node.js.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was debugging errors with Expo, since this framework is so big and obscure at places, it never really provided even a trace to where the error occurred, leaving us to guess where it was most of the time. Another one was securing broadcasts of messages, as websocket broadcasts are really insecure when trying to broadcast the messages to multiple people, so we built a centralized system to handle only sending websocket messages to specific people.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We started a project with a new library, made a decently complete app even with tons of drawbacks, and learned a ton about the mobile ecosystem with React Native.

What we learned

We previously only had a lot of web experience with React, and this is one of few times exploring the React Native and mobile space. We learned a ton about the limitations of mobile, how different it was from just a web browser in some contexts; how to use native, platform specific interfaces and components; how to patch together a lot of libraries; how to deploy mobile apps remotely; how authentication flows work on mobile; different types of libraries we can use to load fonts on different platforms; different types of JSONB PostgreSQL relations; how different UI libraries interface with native elements to create a cross-platform cohesion and so much more. This was truly a unique, albeit very tiring, experience for us!

What's next for linkup

Even if we don't win the $2000, we're planning on making it a reality soon because of how complete it already is. We used a ton of different libraries, went full stack, and are ready for deployment. I hope you can wish us luck! We thank BrickHackX for fueling the need to develop and innovate on an idea we ourselves came up with and are proud of.

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