Inspiration
Our first idea was to make something that would be useful for university life. The first thing that came to mind was what's been most challenging for us this year: making friends. We remembered how the freshers' pages on Instagram helped us talk to people before we even arrived and thought it would be cool if we could program something to make it easier to find compatible people and filter through the hundreds of posts.
What it does
It asks the user to input some data like their name, their course, whether they pour milk in before their cereal or the other way around (the important things). Then it counts the amount of things the user and each of the people already in the database have in common and returns a few paragraphs explaining what the most compatible people it's found like to do and how to contact them.
How we built it
We first thought about what unites people: hobbies, nationality, zodiac sign (?)... And in times like these, the hall you live in or the degree you do. We wrote a csv file with mock data on a few people. Then we looked at how to get user input in the python terminal and wrote a simple script which gets input for each of the categories and loops through the existing csv file to find matches, then adds the user to the database so other people can find them afterwards.
Challenges we ran into
We had only previously worked with numerical data in our degrees, so transitioning from using numpy to pandas was a challenge, there are a lot of differences. But we realised that it's actually a fairly intuitive library and we are glad to have found such an useful tool!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have only gotten some basic notions of C++ and Python in our degrees and we were able to learn how to use some basic commands in Pandas and how to make it interactive, even if it was just in terminal. It was also quite challenging to work across countries, with part of the team living in a noisy student household and conflicting schedules, but we pushed through and we're proud of the result!
What we learned
We learned how to use a library that is widely used in research and we are sure will be useful in the future. Patricia got her first taste of Python and we learned how to work with user input. We also learned how to work collaboratively and it was great to support each others' learning and explain through the information we found online and by talking to the mentors. We didn't end up using Git or Heroku because we lacked some of the language knowledge to actually be able to deploy this, but we definitely took notes at the workshops and look forward to putting it to use.
What's next for Tinderial: by Faraonas
Next and purely for fun, we would love to be able to get it to work online and actually update with real user input. The greatest thing about Imperial so far has been meeting like-minded people (even if it's been mostly online) and finding a network to rely on when work or life gets tough. It would be so cool to be able to help create that network for other people! And hopefully what's next for us is also meeting all of our online friends and some new ones in person :)
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