Missed Connections

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Inspiration

There is an old saying that "everyone are 6 or fewer social connections away from each other". We wanted to visualize that through the wonders of modern technology (Instagram).

What it does

Utilizing a web scraping library built to scrape Instagram, we gathered the followers of the users who put their usernames in and graphed their mutuals.

How we built it

We used Vercel as the frontend and Railway for the backend, using Gunicorn. We utilized Git for Version Control.

Challenges we ran into

Using a library that didn't have organized nor fully-correct documentation forced us to experiment on our own. Figuring out how to actually take follower data from Instagram, something they do not offer on their limited API plan, was a challenge, especially because Instagram utilizes many strategies to deter bots. Also, the front-end team struggled to get comfortable with React.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have successfully produced a full-stack project. We are proud of the backend in particular as it was a handful to debug and successfully implement when faced with large data sets.

What we learned

Python frozensets, Python json library, resolving Git merge conflicts, Flask, React

What's next for Missed Connections

Implementing a tighter, more organized frontend and improving the graph infrastructure, as well as storing the data on a database server rather than a json file.

Built With

• flask
• pip
• python
• railway
• react
• vercel