PomoPals

Landing page
Timer room, with option to change themes

Inspiration

The inspiration came from our daily struggles as students. Pre-covid, we used to study together since we all stayed in hostel. However, once we shifted out of hall and with the pandemic ongoing, it wasn't as easy to study together. I believe that as students, many of us face the monsters of unproductivity and procastination, which are all the more harder to fight alone.

Hence, we wanted to create an application that is able to bring all the study buddies together, equipped with functionalities that make fighting against the monsters easier :-)

What it does

pomopals is an easy to use and intuitive virtual room for friends to come together. All users have to do is create a room just by typing its name, share that link with their friends, and they become pomo pals! In the room, they are able to chat, start a pomodoro timer together, take breaks together, write down their tasks for each other to see, etc. Most importantly we want to encourage users to come together virtually and keep each other's productivity in check!

How we built it

We used React for our frontend, and Express for our backend services. To store all our users, rooms and tasks information, we used PostgreSQL that is hosted on Heroku. A big part of our project relies on real-time connectivity, hence we built the project with the help of socket.io as well.

Challenges we ran into

A big problem of the project was catering to multiple connections at once. Unlike a static page, we ran into a lot of issues having to manage the web socket to create a seamless experience for users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think managing to at least complete partially of what we set out to complete is already an amazing feat, considering most of us are coding amateurs and we tried sockets for the first time in forever since yesterday. Proud of my team :-).

What's next for pomopals

We have a detailed roadmap for pomopals! Things in line are functions such as:

saving of favourited rooms to see their state from the landing page,
being able to view tasks of your friends in the room, and real-time checking off of tasks to encourage yourself to do the same
of course, we want to deploy this app as soon as we iron out the validations and bugs!