Meet Me in the Middle

Inspiration

What inspired us was our constant struggle to find a middle point when planning where to meet. One person always ends up walking a marathon while the other drives in 2 minutes from home. In an effort to create software that connects people, we wanted to take the stress out of finding that middle point and allow people to spend more time connecting with each other (at an equidistant location)!

What it does

Meet Me in the Middle takes two locations and provides recommendations under chosen categories that are situated in an area that will take each party a similar amount of travel time to get to. Users can select their mode of transport as well as a category of location (e.g. cafe, library, gym) that they would like to meet at.

How we built it

Meet Me in the Middle is a web-based platform, which uses an HTML and CSS front-end and Flask framework to connect it to the python-based back-end. This was combined with a SQLite3 database for persistent data storage. We also utilised the Google Maps API for our backend, allowing us to effectively calculate locations that take a roughly equal amount of time for both parties to travel to.

Challenges we ran into

When we started, we had little experience with Flask, APIs or front end languages, making this a daunting task to undertake. A main challenge on the backend was figuring out an effective algorithm to find the middle point that would minimise unnecessary API calls to ensure performance. Another challenge was linking the backend to the frontend of our application, which required significant teamwork to link properly since the backend required the frontend team to get their inputs, and the frontend team needed the backend team to figure out where to place their inputs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For all of us, this is our first hackathon!!!! :))) We put our all into it and are extremely proud of the fact that we created a working prototype even though we might not be the most technically skilled team.

What we learned

One major lesson learnt from this was how to collaborate effectively. We delegated the tasks of this project to each member and struggled (but prevailed) with many merge conflicts in our github repo. We all grew exponentially in our technical skills by the trial and error of this project.

What's next for Meet Me in the Middle

Our ideas for the expansion of Meet Me in the Middle are to expand it to connect more locations, as well as storing history of connections. We would also be interested in creating a mobile app. We think our algorithm could have applications in office-planning or city-planning in the future as well!