Pear Programming: there's no need to develop alone

A fun way to create or join teams for development projects or MLH hackathon events

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Inspiration

Helping hackathon participants engage in team building. We often see lots of different developers with a variety of technical skills working independently and we want to expedite the connection process so that they can work together.

What it does

Allows users to create or join teams for MLH hackathons, personal projects, or anything else that could engage a group of developers. Users can create a profile, add skills, create teams, search for existing teams, and view updates on their teams.

How we built it

SwiftUI beta framework for iOS built in Xcode IDE. Interfaces with Google Firebase backend. Our team was targeting the latest technology for all aspects of our implementation where possible, sometimes at the expense of ease of development or documentation.

Challenges we ran into

SwiftUI is a bleeding edge front end framework from Apple. None of our team had Swift or any iOS experience prior to this weekend and we wanted a challenge. SwiftUI is still in its infancy and lacks many of the luxuries that can be expected from other well established frameworks and languages. For instance, interfacing with Firebase was particularly challenging since it has not been updated to support SwiftUI natively. We had to spend a lot of time researching programming practices and features due to lack of familiarity and loosely established standards.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Interfacing successfully with the Firebase database
  • Successfully implemented Asynchronous processes in a declarative UI environment.
  • Maintained good software engineering practices despite time constraints.
  • Consistent and well designed UI that abides by iOS standards.
  • Designing a UI that supports multiple devices.
  • Learned a lot about iOS, Swift, SwiftUI, Firebase, CocoaPods ## What we learned
  • Xcode
  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • Firebase
  • Async
  • Declarative UI design
  • Newest != Best
  • Integration of different services and technologies.
  • You may need to be your own linter because your IDE has no clue where the error is. ## What's next for Pear Programming
  • Constraint Solver: One on one blind date selection for software developers.
  • Live activity feed: keep up to date with events and equads that your skills align with.
  • MLH event calendar integration (of course).
  • Personal portfolio based off of previous hackathon participation.
  • Loot boxes.
  • Support for sponsored events (Hack K State I'm looking at you).
  • Squad role assignments.
  • Trying to fit our first place trophy in the car on our way back to Lincoln, NE.

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