Lunch Buddies

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  starting screen

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  Tables

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  Different options after claiming seat

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  Twilio Chat Messaging

Inspiration: All of us shared a common experience of going to the Fast Food Cafe(the main cafeteria at JHU) and either sitting down alone and eating our food while looking at our phones or taking the food to go back to our dorms to eat alone because we did not know anyone and we were too shy and uncomfortable to approach anyone and eat with them.

What it does: This app helps people safely socialize in FFC. The first person to enter will simply claim a seat. Any other users entering ffc will then be able to see that a seat is claimed, and by clicking on it, they are able to enter a twilio-based messaging system/group chat with people that have claimed seats. We also plan to implement pinging any users in or near FFC in the future.

How we built it: We utilized the XCode IDE to program the application in Swift. We also used Twilio APIs to implement the messaging platform and ngrok to host a domain.

Challenges we ran into: We continually made significant syntax errors in Swift. We also made numerous mistakes while initially using Twilio APIs to create the messaging platform. Namely, it took us several hours to generate Twilio access tokens.

Accomplishments that we're proud of: We are proud of taking the initial steps necessary of helping a lot of people at JHU and at colleges across the world combat anxieties related to socializing. We have also become much familiar with the app development process and back-end programming. We also developed our UI significantly over the course of the hackathon.

What we learned: We learned that server-side programming is far more difficult than designing and coding the user interface.

What's next for Lunch Buddies: We need to build out more features to make this app even more functional and easy to use.

Built With

• swift
• twilio