Tempest

Inspiration

Finding people with common interests as you can be difficult, but finding people with common interests that you're actually interested in interacting with is even harder. Too often, we see last minute searches for company and partnership at school, in the workplace, and in recreational activities. Unfortunately, these desperate searchings for, say, a hackathon team for the weekend go unanswered. Often, people find it difficult to put themselves out there socially and face the fear of rejection as well as the lack of a medium for connection. Posts on Facebook or Twitter go unanswered, and the apathetic approaches of the searchers result in less than ideal results. Our app hopes to solve these problems, utilizing a Tinder-eque matching system along with the variety and expansiveness of a website like Craigslist to drive up user interaction with an intuitive, easy interface.

What it does

Our hack is an application designed to match users based on similar interests. A user can join an existing room or create his or her room of choice, based on categories/topics, location, or a combination. All users and their profiles in a room are visible to each other, and if interested, can request to connect to another user. Connection occurs when both users have requested the connection, opening up private messaging. Rooms and matches/connections can be joined and left at the will of the user.

How we built it

We used Google's robust Firebase along with HTML/CSS and JS to produce a web app. Database for users/rooms are held in the Firebase project's database, including user authentication for login and sign out. Users, their profiles, and the rooms are all stored within the database. We added organizing tools like a favorite system, "popular"/"near me" categories, and a clean UI, all with the user in mind.

Challenges we ran into

Not all of our members were very experienced with CS/hackathons, and none of us had used Firebase up to this point. Learning to use it's API, it's real-time database, and it's interactions with the rest of the webapp was one of the key challenges in producing our hack. The spotty wifi occasionally caused delays where we could not access the database and had to halt progression until it returned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a functional database of users and rooms, and successfully implemented authentication of users on login. The site is secure and fast, and scalable thanks to the properties of Firebase. We also produced some complicated Javascript functions that dynamically modify our web pages based on the user and rooms available/joined.

What we learned

We learned a great deal about how to use Firebase and its myriad of useful functions, as well as structuring its real-time database. We learned how to implement and manipulate the backend, and how it interacted with the HTML/CSS of our website. We also picked up many of the nuances of Javascript/jQuery and it's usages in a web app.