Local

Inspiration

The United States has many cities that are big hot spots for engineers, such as San Francisco, Austin, New York City, and Seattle. Local allows for local talent to connect with startups and businesses in their proximity and give back to their community.

What it does

Local is a platform that recommends Seekers and companies/ recruiters to each other based on a trained AI module that learns what individual users want based on their preferences and criteria. Seekers and companies on the platform can match with each other to show their explicit interest in one another, leading to an interaction between the two. Local also provides an interactive map that shows all companies / startups in the local area on Local's platform to users.

How we built it

Local is built on Flask backend utilizing a React frontend while maintaining a minimalistic and friendly user interface. Local has a database that is run on MongoDB servers, and a map of the local Buffalo area pulled from Google Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

There are various challenges we ran into in the initial development of Local. Our backend to frontend connections were not implementing correctly to the backend and we spent various hours debugging these problems. Another challenge we ran into was correct task distribution and full utilization of our team's strengths.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Local's implementation of our AI Recommendation System is something that our team is very proud of. The initial idea of a trained module was something that we carried throughout the entire project from beginning to end.

What we learned

We learned as a team how to effectively communicate with one another our tasks and what we needed from other team members to cover our personal weaknesses. One such example was that some of our members weren't familiar with a certain framework that we decided to implement, and the other members crash coursed them on the basic implementation.

What's next for Local

Local has many features that can be implemented; such as a live chat feature and data analytic perks. Local is very scalable within the scope of US and can even be deployed throughout the world.