StudyCrowd

A version of our architecture
The prototype wireframe of our login!
The prototype wireframe of our home feed!
The prototype wireframe of our bookmarks!

Inspiration

Study sessions get lost on discord, campus servers are filled with a lil "anyone wanna study at 4 today?" or "whos at building 80 today?" and it'll generally either get buried or lost We wanted those throwaway less effort intents of finding a spontaneous study session to become discoverable meetups, so we built StudyCrowd!
Simply, " I want to hang out with people who I normally wouldn't".

What it does

StudyCrowd is a mobile app that turns cross-discipline social media signals (in this MVP, discord signals) into a live feed of study sessions, bringing disconnected studying communities together.

How we built it

The whole thing is a Flutter mobile app backed by firebase and paired with a discord bot for our MVP. The app uses streaming firestore queries so the feed updates in real time. Firestore holds posts, users, bookmarks and comments, and cloud functions act as the only place wjhere OAuth secrets live. The discord bot listens to messages, sends them through a cloud function to powered by JEV to decide whether a message is a real event, which then loops into the app feed.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was figuring out what architecture actually supports our vision, in the span of 4 hours, we switched architectures 3 times due to some features in our mind simply not being doable (like JEV), which inadverdently solidified our understanding of the finalized architecture.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We ended up shipping a fully deployable full-stack product, a mobile app, a discord bot and a cloud backend that all work together. The discord-native authentication is true OAuth authentication with server-side secret handling.

What we learned

The biggest transferrable lesson is always security. We attended a session on opening your inference up to public IP's and we actioned on that by having our JEV API only accessible through a bearer token, which not many people set up. Besides that, we learned how firebase stores secrets, how to build an end to end OAuth flow and finally, integrating a third party AI API into a product taught us that classifier quality needs tuning and doesn't just work out of the box

What's next for StudyCrowd

The goal is to move past discord integration into integrations such as slack, skype and other apps that provide the integration that discord does! The goal is for it to be seamless, all feeds all merging into one App Feed.