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Connecting strangers or soon-to-be friends with our interface
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Inspiration
Seeing and interacting with all of the strange witty and absolutely hilarious posts on the well-known rutgers.missedconnections Instagram page has inspired us to create an app; featuring the same concept of users submitting anonymous posts about their encounters with strangers they would like to connect with.
What it does
Our goal is to be a bridge to connect people, spark friendships, and engage students in the community. The app builds on the original missed connections idea by adding location and chat features and designing a user-friendly feed to potentially connect with a post.
How we built it
RU Missed Connections is powered by React Native and Express.js. Our back-end implements MySQL and Google Compute, while our front-end most notably implements Google Maps and Google Places. We divided our efforts into working on the front-end and back-end, with 3 of us working on the front-end for the majority of the time, and 1 working on the back-end.
Challenges we ran into
While trying to implement Google Cloud SQL, we were unable to properly connect to the service and had sunk several hours into trying to get it to work. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion to use Google Compute to host our own MySQL server. Our front-end team struggled with getting the various Google APIs to work nicely but we were ultimately able to overcome these challenges.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite all of the obstacles we faced, we were able to realize our creative vision and develop a minimum viable product. Our main goal was to develop a sleek and minimalistic feature-rich UI and we're glad to have achieved that.
What we learned
We've learned how to work with each other using Git and work in a rapid development life cycle to produce an awesome product. We also learned how to bridge the gap between the front-end and back-end efficiently.
What's next for RU Missed Connections
Fixing bugs, implementing Rutgers NetID/email authentication, improving UI/UX, streamlining code to accommodate a large number of users, and avoiding spam/malicious posts.
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