Project Base
Overview
This project was inspired by the fact that many CS students who want to work on a project on their own time, whether it may be to build their resume, or learn a new technology, don't always have an idea for a project to get started on. We also see that many CS students who do have ideas, can't find interested team members to tackle the project with them. As a result, grew our idea: Project Base. Project Base is essentially a networking platform for students that are interested in working on a project to find one, and for students looking for others to collaborate with to connect with one another. Although there exist job boards where students can find paid opportunities, there aren't as many services where students are encouraged to work with one another to further their interest in the field.
Implementation and Features
We decided to create a web application using Ruby on Rails, React.js, jQuery, HTML/CSS, and SQL. Our architecture was primarily based on MVC, as Rails goes hand in hand with it. Our goal was to create a minimum viable product where you can post your ideas and view them. Rails was incorporated to put the data into json files. In our current version, you are able to make a new post, upvote ideas you think are good, and search through the posts. We created a web hosted MySQL server and took advantage of ActiveRecord's functions to structure our database. We used React for our front end, utilizing child components based on dependencies. To invoke a better UX and feel, we incorporated react-bootstrap, that provided us with many custom components.
Future expansion
The next step for this project is to include user accounts and the ability for users to message each other. We would also like to incorporate the ability to log-in with LinkedIn to better match users with available projects. We also want to look into the ability to use machine learning to understand make suggestions on what type of projects a user is typically is interested in based on how they choose to upvote other ideas.
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