MealMate

A web app that helps UBC students meet new people. Users can post meetups with location, time, and group size, and others can browse and RSVP making campus life less lonely and more connected.

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Inspiration

Making friends on campus is harder than it needs to be, on such a large and busy campus it's really easy to feel isolated. Our team wanted to solve that by building a platorm with helps students connect in a casual and spontaneous way that encourages connections to form. By making our web app as effortless as possible, we remove the anxiety of reaching out and simplifying the oramization of meetups. We hope to change the general feeling of "UBC is so lonely" into "UBC feel like home"!

What it does

After logging in, users can choose from restaurants across campus and create a meetup post by selecting a time and the number of people they want to join. Each post is displayed on the platform with clear information about the location, meeting time, and the current number of RSVPs. Students can also browse posts created by others and decide which meetups they want to join with a single click. Whether someone wants to grab lunch, go for a coffee run or just meet new people, MealMate makes it easy to host or join spontaneous gatherings.

How we built it

We used Python and fastapi for the backend, and used React, JS, html, and CSS for the front end

Challenges we ran into

Over the course of our hackathon we ran into many new challenges, the biggest of which was version control. Collaborating in a team of 4, we often ran into trouble when commiting as often our changes would conflict with each other and we would spend lots of time fixing merge issues. We also had difficulties getting the backend to communiate well with the frontend and we spend hour debugging and almost rewritting entire entire files.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Made a goated app.

What we learned

While building MealMate, we gained a deeper understanding of how to build a full web application from the ground up. We learned how to work with React.js to create frontend user interfaces. We also became much more comfortable making and handling API calls to connect the front end with the back end. More than just the techical skills we practiced, we also learned a great deal more about project workflows figuring out how to define a realistic scope, adapting when features turned out to be more complex than expected, and troubleshooting the many challenges that come with getting different parts of a system to work together. Overall, the experience taught us both the technical and collaborative skills needed to bring an idea to life under hackathon pressure.

What's next for MealMate

MealMate is coming to Mobile! This will allow users even greater convinence when organising or joining meetups. We also are planning more working more on the UI, making the experience smooth and enjoyable for our users.

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