MustangLink

We built MustangLink: an edu verified hub for Cal Poly rides & social. It replaces sketchy social groups with a unified UI and a real time AI assistant that answers campus questions using live data.

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Inspiration

Campus life at Cal Poly is currently fragmented. We found ourselves jumping between sketchy Facebook groups for rides, Reddit for news, and Discord for social life. These platforms are unverified, disorganized, and often feel unsafe. We wanted to build a Mustang only digital space, built specifically for our community.

What it does

MustangLink is a verified campus hub that centralizes four key pillars: Ride Share, Lost & Found, Social, and Opportunities.

  1. Verification: Users must sign in with a .edu email, ensuring the community stays exclusive to students.
  2. Integrated Messaging: We built a messaging system so students can coordinate pickups or item returns safely within the app, keeping personal contact info private.
  3. Community Modules: Each section allows for real time posting and threaded replies.
  4. AI Assistant: Our standout feature is a real time AI assistant that "reads" the community data. Students can ask questions like "Is anyone going to SF next week?" or "Where was that lost hydroflask?" and get instant answers based on live user posts.

How we built it

We used Supabase for our backend, leveraging its real time database for both the community posts and the instant messaging system. For the AI, we used Groq’s API for quick inference. By feeding our real time Supabase data into Groq, we created an assistant that can answer questions about campus life with near zero latency. The UI was built with a clean, modern design to prioritize mobile usability and quick communication.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was the real time bridge between the data and AI. We had to ensure that as soon as a student posted a Ride Share, that data was immediately available to the AI. Coordinating the data flow between Supabase and our Groq API calls required careful architectural planning to ensure the AI always had the most up to second context without slowing down the user experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of the full interaction loop we created. A student can ask the AI for help, find a fellow Mustang, and send them a message all within a verified, secure environment. Building a functional verification system, a real-time AI, and a messaging platform in our first hackathon was a huge win for the team.

What we learned

This was our team's first time competing in a hackathon and we all felt that we were able to learn a lot. The most important ideas we learned were how to utilize real time data management and how to turn a static database into knowledge that is actually useful.

Beyond the tech, the most valuable lesson was about the engineering process itself. We learned that problems rarely get solved on the first try. We spent hours in intense debugging cycles and endless trial and error sessions. We realized that building a functional product isn't about getting it right immediately, but rather about having the patience to iterate through failures until it finally works.

What's next for MustangLink

We want to take MustangLink beyond an MVP. Our roadmap includes many objectives:

  1. Push Notifications: Alerting users in real-time when they receive a new direct message or a reply to their post.
  2. Club APIs: Integrating with official Cal Poly calendars so the AI can answer questions about school-sanctioned events.
  3. Smart Notifications: Using Groq to summarize long reply threads and send users quick blurb notifications for their posts.

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