SyllySync

Inspiration

For students in the quarter system, as in UCSB, we are constantly changing our calendars to reflect the changing schedules and classes. What if you could use a program that fills in your calendar for you? SyllySync does just that!

What it does

SyllySync is a web app that allows the user to submit a syllabus, and then parses through the syllabus to find deadlines, exam dates, and lecture dates. It then prompts the user to log in to their gmail, and creates a new calendar within Google Calendar, which it then populates with all the events that were extracted from the syllabus.

How we built it

We used Bootstrap and React to design the front-end web app, where the user can upload their syllabus and log in to Google. The syllabus is then parsed using an open AI key, which was trained to extract any important dates. These dates get stored in a specific format to be passed on to a script that uses Google Cloud Calendar API to create a new calendar for the user and create all the events in that new calendar.

Challenges we ran into

The Google oauth2 was a challenge to use, and caused us a lot of grief. We repeatedly ran into uri-mismatch errors, and couldn't tell if they were because of something we did wrong or just that the Google Cloud API was taking forever to update. It ended up being a mix of both. It also took us sometime to figure out how to integrate all the pieces of code that we were individually working on. Lastly, we attempted to run our web app on a server so that it would be more easily accessible by others, but we never figured that out in time so we went back to hosting it locally.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the first Hackathon that any of us have attended and the first significant project for several of us. Given that, we are all very proud to have our first working project, even if we didn't complete all of our goals!

What we learned

We split up the tasks so we each learned a smattering of front-end development (Bootstrap, React), google cloud, servers, or back-end development, etc.