Inspiration
MeetStreet stems from the desire to revive authentic, in-person social interactions in a digital age dominated by online communication. As social media and messaging apps often encourage virtual connections, MeetStreet aims to counteract the growing sense of isolation by facilitating face-to-face meetings, reminiscent of how people used to connect spontaneously before the digital era. This is our attempt at providing a modern solution to encourage real-world interactions in an increasingly virtual world.
What it does
It allows users to see other users nearby and initiate a conversation and if both parties are interested they arrange a face-to-face meetup.
How we built it
The web app's backend is built using Flask and consists of different modules to create user profiles, send friend requests, and update user locations, among many others. The frontend is built using React, Tailwind, Redux, and Leaflet. The APIs are tested using Postman.
Challenges we ran into
None of us had experience working with backend development, so all of us had to learn a framework on the go and implement the features we wanted. Furthermore, our original plan to implement a working chat system in the app using Socket did not come to fruition, also due to our lack of experience.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite the challenges and the flaws of our project, all of us have learned valuable technical skills from working together and having to do things on the fly. More important than this, is the fact that we had fun building this MVP.
What we learned
We picked up the basics of Flask, MongoDB, integration of frontend and backend, as well as the fact that we should have brought our crockeries :(
What's next for MeetStreet
To improve upon our proof of concept for MeetStreet, aside from making a functional chat feature, the priority would be ensuring the safety of the users. This would mean implementing an SOS feature and making sure all users are verified using their IDs. After this, additional features such as ice breaker games in addition to the chat feature can make first interactions much more lively. A quality of life feature would be the ability to have a 'Safe Zone' where users can define places where they'd like to be discovered and as soon as they leave the area they are not visible to others.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.