Match Your Feels

Come join an anonymous community of people struggling with mental health issues together.

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Inspiration

We were struggling to come up with a good idea when we realized that speaking to one another is a good idea in itself for people with emotional distress. We wanted to make something that allowed others to communicate in the same safe environment that we had without worry of embarrassment or negative judgement.

What it does

Match Your Feels allows users to sign up and take a quick quiz to be matched anonymously with other people with similar results - experiencing similar mental distress. We would then provide a foundation for them to connect and talk about their mental health issues without worry of stigma. We emphasized the importance of anonymity and ease of access. Mental health is a touchy subject and is difficult to address in standard social settings. By creating a platform specifically designed to allow people to talk about their mental health struggles, we can bypass the awkwardness of first impressions and asking for permission to speak. In addition, anonymity helps users to slowly accept themselves and their issues so they can build up to talking to IRL friends and family about the same topic.

How I built it

Started a project on Google's App Engine and uploaded version builds onto there from JavaScript code. All of our storage is held and maintained by Firebase, from user authentication to chat messages. We built a basic Web GUI to support the chat and match system through Google's Firebase Platform.

Challenges I ran into

Starting up Google's App Engine proved to be surprisingly difficult and a large majority of our time was spent setting it up. We tried 2 different programming languages before coming to the conclusion that we should all learn JavaScript for our project. JavaScript really is hard, and learning new programming languages on the spot was very difficult. As such, we had a really hard time developing the backend of our web app and connecting it to the front end.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to build a basic front end GUI that looked appealing to the user. We gained new knowledge and insight of new programming languages and their applications for different tasks. Each member contributed a different skill and talent to the project itself. Lastly, we actually put something together and gave the project our best work.

What I learned

What is JavaScript? Oh, this is what JavaScript is. So, then what's Node.js? Oh, this is what Node.js is? Rinse and repeat with everything. We all had to learn how to program new languages on the fly and be accustomed to new situations easily.

What's next for Match Your Feels

If given more time, we would like to continue developing the backend and a more extensive web app. We'd love to implement Google's natural language ML APIs to be able to better match users based on their initial quiz responses. The ML API could also be used in moderating and reporting toxic users aiming to target emotionally vulnerable users. And of course, more sleep would be ideal too.

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