toGather

landing page
events page
chats page
profile page

Inspiration

Meeting new people and finding great events shouldn’t feel like a challenge - but for many, it does. Whether you’re a new grad in a new city or just looking to expand your social circle, discovering the right events and connecting with like-minded people can be overwhelming.

toGather makes it effortless! Simply swipe on events which interest you, and we’ll do the rest. toGather matches you with others who are also interested in similar events and instantly creates group chats to help you connect, plan, and attend events together. No more missed opportunities or feelings of FOMO, you’ll have the opportunity to make new friends and memories you’ll never forget. By turning event discovery into a seamless, social experience, toGather helps users meet new people, explore the city, and make every outing more memorable.

What it does

toGather empowers users to find new events and find others also interested in attending those events. First, users browse events happening near them and indicate their interest in attending by swiping right or left, or click the red or green thumbs up buttons. The app automatically creates group chats with those who share an interest in attending the event to coordinate plans. The user can click on the other members in the group chat to view their details. Users can also customize their profiles, such as updating their location and setting their event preferences to find the best matches.

How we built it

Frontend: React for the UI, TailwindCSS for styling, and Vite for development and building.
Backend: Nodejs + Express for the API and webscraping, AWS S3 for deployment.

Challenges

One of the challenges we ran into was developing a JavaScript function to web scrape and collect data of upcoming events in the user’s chosen city to populate the events shown to the user. This challenge was resolved by referencing example code from the libraries we chose (Axios and cheerio) and using the Inspect on the HTML of our chosen site (https://allevents.in/) to locate the elements we wanted to use.

Another challenge was connecting our Node.js backend to our React frontend as there was a CORS issue from the two running on different ports locally. This issue was resolved by setting up Express and using its routing/middleware utilities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of successfully creating a platform where users can create accounts that save their details and event preferences. Our matching algorithm ensures that users can connect with others who share the same interests and automatically creates group chats so they can plan and attend events together. Once users are matched, we were able to implement notifications that alert users when a group chat has been created. We also managed to figure out how to design a smooth, engaging UI with a swiping motion that makes browsing for events fun and intuitive.

What we learned

We learned how to build out components in React, create pages using react-router, resolve CORS issues, and web scrape HTML with JavaScript libraries.

What's next for toGather

Our goal is to further refine and expand toGather to focus on making event discovery and social connections even more seamless and personalized. Here’s a glimpse into what’s coming next:

Event Discovery: Improving the web scraper to get more events from a variety of sources, and improving its integration with the UI.
Extra Personalization: Allowing users to further specify specific events they dislike, or other preferences about events such as in neighboring cities.
Messaging: Allowing users to friend and direct message other users.