Optime

Inspiration

We live in a busy, busy world, what with school, work, social media… we treasure those moments when we can sit down with friends and just enjoy life. But scheduling such events is such a pain! One needs to find a time when everyone is free. And in our experience, that never happens. Someone’s bound to have dance class, someone’s having a ping-pong tournament, someone’s grinding Among Us. Wouldn’t it be nice if something could do all that for you? It would save so much time having something find a time when everyone’s free…

lightbulb

What it does

Optime plans events so you don’t have to. One can set parameters for Optime to use (ex. day range, time range, event duration) and invite users, and Optime will do the rest. Using the e-calendars (ex. Google Calendar) that invited users have uploaded, Optime will return time slots in which all the users are free: the event planner will then choose their favorite time slot, and Optime will send an RSVP out to all those invited. Perfect! Time saved! Now you can focus on things that actually matter, like Among Us. (Note: This is what Optime is meant to do. Optime is very basic and may have bugs or other issues.)

How we built it

Optime divides the inputted possible times into windows which represent 15-minute increments. It calculates the “denial rate” for each increment, by seeing how many people would be available at the time. It uses the denial rate and the inputted event duration to find an optimal time; by looking for combinations with low denial rates. After that, it returns one of the options with the lowest denial rates.

Challenges we ran into

The prime challenge we faced was the issue that we did not, in fact, have any friends. Other than that, we struggled with deadlines as we did not have enough time to implement many of the ideas we originally had. We also didn’t know how to implement them, but we learned a lot through the process and we have ideas on how to refine Optime in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re very proud of what we were able to get done, especially with our limited knowledge of web development languages and our tiny timeframe. We love the idea behind Optime, as we believe with enough refinement, it could genuinely be useful to us; we’re also very proud of our scheduling algorithm.

What we learned

We learned much about web development, idea pitching, and video editing; we also learned about teamwork, communication, and hard work.

What's next for Optime

We'd like to hammer out some bugs/errors in our code, as Optime is very much in its infancy. We’d also like to refine our website’s UI, improve its security and privacy settings, and work on its efficiency. We’d also like to add other integrations (Steam, Epic, Discord, Google) and customizable statuses. In terms of physical planning, we’d like to add weather features, such as: showing the planner what the weather will be like on certain days so they can plan accordingly; automatically rescheduling an outdoor event based on the weather while resending RSVPs to those attending; and hacking into the Matrix in order to modify the weather files for the day.