MerriMates

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from our own struggles to learn new hobbies. As students and tech enthusiasts, we love learning, but finding time, resources, and people to share that learning with can be tough. We wanted to build something that encourages curiosity and makes learning social, affordable, and fun, a space where people could connect through shared passions instead of traditional classrooms.

What it does

Our website allows users to list down whatever hobbies they have and what they would wish to learn. Then they can roam the website and find others who might wish to learn a skill the user already knows or someone who is teaching the skill that the user would like to learn. It’s a fast and fun way to learn about new hobbies and gain new skills.

How we built it

We used figma along with react.js for the UI and overall frontend and we tried using Supabase but it was the first time any of us have ever used it before. Github was used for version control and the branch system was extremely helpful as all 4 of us were working on different portions of the project at the same time.

Challenges we ran into

We faced a lot of challenges during these 24 hours, specifically with our backend. We had some issues with the relational database design and connecting the backend to the frontend without breaking our UI completely.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The design visuals are super super important to any project, it’s the first impression that you will make on the users. We’re proud of the design and the overall aesthetic of the website. It took us quite a while to agree on the visuals but the theme, plus the clever name and the beautiful logo drawn by one of our team members all turned out cohesive and pleasing.

What we learned

We learned that before jumping into anything, we need to have a proper plan and a cohesive vision together as a group. Time management is also very important, even if 24 hours seems like a long time to work. Finally we also learned that having prior experience is really helpful and being better prepared with the tools necessary is essential.

What's next for MerriMates

Currently our backend has given up on us, it doesn’t seem to want to connect to the front end so first we'd love to implement a backend database that works. In the future we hope to integrate a video call system so users can talk through the website. We’d like some smart scheduling like a google calendar import to keep track of meetings with others. Lastly we would like to add language support or translation tools to make learning accessible to everyone all around the globe.