ProjectFinder

Tinder for Coders

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Inspiration

As we are all well aware, there are currently strict restrictions in place and UoE students are spread all across the globe. This has had a huge impact on the ability of students to meet other like-minded and ambitious people and it has also made it harder for students to get involved in the things that they enjoy. As first-year students, this has hit us particularly hard as we have struggled to make connections with our fellow students and to get to grips with university life and finding out about the opportunities that are available to us.

Many of us are interested in participating in a wide range of projects that are on offer to university students so that we can put our coding skills to the test, experience new things and meet other students however this has posed to be a great challenge during the pandemic and has personally hindered our university experience.

Our idea, ProjectFinder aims to solve this problem.

What it does?

Our solution to this problem is to provide an app for students to sign up for projects and opportunities that interest them with ease. Our goal is to create an interface where both developers and students can be paired up to collaborate and form a mutual agreement to help each other out. This will help developers to find the talent that they require, and also help motivate students to get involved and expand their knowledge and practical experience.

How does it work?

ProjectFinder is an app where users can sign up as a project organizer or project participant.

During the signup process, participants are asked to list the various project fields and topics that they would be interested in working on. Participants will then be given a list of suitable projects using a recommender system. The participant and the project organizer(s) can then be put in contact through a chat system on the website (not implemented). This is done to ensure that the chat between the developer and project owner is done safely and securely. They will be able to discuss the project details, schedule an interview and decide whether they want to work together. Participants will be kept updated regularly on new projects that appear on the app that would be of interest to them.

How we built it

We have developed this app with the help of Android Studio. This uses programming languages like Java and XML. Java is used to write the functionality of the app while XML is used to prepare the UI of the app. For the backend, we have used Google Cloud's Firebase to create and use a database that stores the user’s information. It also has an authentication system that allows the users to register themselves or log in.

Challenges we ran into

Even though we are a team of 4, none of us have any previous experience with Android Studio or making an android app. As we have had to learn everything from scratch, we ran into multiple issues.

One issue that we ran into while working on the frontend was figuring out the SDK version of Gradle. Since certain functions were only a part of older versions, we had to find equivalent functions in the latest version, which was tedious. In the backend, user information was not being stored and the database would not load up properly. This seemed like an extremely complicate issue at first, but after a little time working with it, the fix turned out to be to simply change the permissions for the DB access.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having no prior experience with app development, making a partially working prototype has been the biggest accomplishment and we are all extremely proud of it. Within a short span of 24 hours we were able to learn all and that, is something we are definitely proud of. Moreover, we are also really proud of the fact that we were able to work this out and plan it well in a short duration. We worked on multiple parts of the project together, thus saving time and finishing the work more effectively.

What we learned

This hackathon has been an amazing learning experience for us, and we all gained a lot of knowledge about app development. We also learned about the effort that goes into making an android app and the UI for it. Coding in Java is something we all have experience with, but XML is completely new, and designing the frontend with XML was one of the best learning experiences. Also, working with Firebase has taught us how APIs and mAuth systems work, It gave us a brief understanding of an online database that an app can connect to and operate on data. This has been an amazing learning experience for us, and I hope we will be able to use this knowledge in future hackathons or personal projects. This experience has helped in preparing us for our future careers.

What's next for ProjectFinder

  • Work on a chat system for the developer and project owner.
  • Set-up a rewards system to motivate students to engage in more projects.
  • Allow users to attach their CV to their profiles and allow students to receive potential internship or job offers.
  • Allow students to also take part in other things such as competitions, hackathon, etc.
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