Inspiration
Often times in our daily lives, we come across the issue of not knowing whether we have the time to spend with our family and friends whilst also managing work and school responsibilities and other duties tugging on us. "Who's Free?" strives to decrease these moments of uncertainty by providing a quick and easy way for the user to see how their life is on an easy scale with a system that learns based on the user's schedules and patterns.
What it does
"Who's Free?" combines technologies made by many of the sponsors of MHacks X, including Twilio, AWS, and Google to create an unmatched user experience. When a user begins their journey with "Who's Free?", they pick along a simple scale resembling a traffic light to signify how busy they believe they are based on their day's schedule. Their friends can then see how their friends compare and make plans and arrangements quickly and efficiently. The user can also choose to import their Google Calendar to the app. From there, "Who's Free?" has intelligent predictor algorithms that have the ability to learn their schedule and preferences to judge how busy they are on the three choice scale.
How we built it
As we began our process into building our software, we realized that dividing and conquering to apply our individual skill sets was the best form of management for our team. Pushing everyone in fields they thrive in promotes the passion and work ethic we hope to portray through "Who's Free?". Our back-end team focused first on creating a simple one-to-many database with Flask, while our front-end team got to work on the basics of the Android app, with both teams collaborating to tie the two together. As we advanced in our project, we added features on both sides that would improve the overall experience for the users and increase efficiency behind the scenes.
Challenges we ran into
Although "Who's Free?" provides a smooth, easy experience for the end user, it was at times a rocky road for the creators. The main struggles experienced came from the our implementation of our servers with Amazon Web Services. As our team was not as experienced as we had hoped to be with it, there was a learning curve. However, we were all determined and applied ourselves so that we could learn and use a reliable service for our users. Along with AWS issues, we struggled with chatter between the front-end Android app powered by Java and the back-end Flask servers written in Python. JSON was a reliable option that ended up assisting us greatly along our journey.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Above all, "Who's Free?" is proud of the seamless experience for the user that provides a way to further manage the hectic lives that they live. We set out to accomplish this goal and achieved it. The majority of our initial designs we accomplished and ended up in our final build. We created an experience that will hopefully help the end user, and as our overall goal, it has gone above and beyond expectations in that aspect.
What we learned
Aside from the skills learned along the way, such as AWS and Twilio, we at "Who's Free?" learned more about our own abilities. As young creators, we have had little experience with a real world experience in the Computer Science industry. However, MHacks has provided us with an outlet to push ourselves, while also sticking to deadlines and other requirements whilst realizing what can and cannot be accomplished, only limited by our own desire and will to create it. All of this while in an encouraging environment that promoted this desire to learn and discover more technologies.
What's next for "Who's Free?"
As we hope to expand and grow "Who's Free?", we cannot stay on a small Flask script running on AWS. We must scale with the hopeful growth that we receive. Along with this, we hope to improve the user's experience with our learning algorithm by further researching machine learning, and finding patterns in user's data so that we can improve the experience for our users at all levels, and improve the technologies upon which we build.
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