unisquad

a university friend activity planner which allows friend groups to enter their schedules and builds activity plans weekly with both external events and uni-based club events

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Inspiration

We had too many "when are you free?" messages in the group chat that were really confusing and cluttering, so we wanted something that just shows you when everyone's free without the back and forth.

What it does

You can import your timetable from uni and add custom events, classes, job times, etc. Allows people within the same friend group to see when their friends are free and don't have uni classes. This information is presented as a heatmap of the week where more red means more people are busy and less red means that there's more people free. You can see other people's individual timetables by clicking on them or clicking on a busy timeslot and seeing who exactly is busy. It allows you to plan activities like bowling, lunch, uni club activities and more and it suggests the best times automatically. People can RSVP so you know who's actually coming.

How we built it

React frontend with custom calendar, events, and heatmap. Supabase for authentication, group creation and inviting (via invite codes) and data syncing of events. Pretty much all of the code was written by Claude Sonnet 4.6 (free model). Debugging was also done mostly via Claude, which suggested approaches to fix the issues we ran into with Supabase. We started by generating a frontend and refining it until we managed to get it to implement the features we wanted (for example the heatmap). We then generated SQL config for the Supabase database as well as client-side api interactions to interact with the backend.

Challenges we ran into

It took a while to figure out the best and most efficient way to display data to users in the most easy-to-read way. We initially wanted to just have a heatmap, but we realised that we could make transparent blocks that could be stacked on top and to the side of each other to display more in-depth information too. The other challenge we ran into was using Supabase RLS, as it wouldn't let users add their own events to the public database. We had to fix it with security definer functions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the heatmap concept which we thing works better than most shared calendars, especially for groups with large amounts of people (> 10).

What we learned

We learnt how to integrate supabase into our react frontend

What's next for unisquad

Push notifications when someone plans an activity or RSVPs. Semester-aware scheduling so it knows about stuvac and exam periods. Maybe expanding beyond friend groups so you can see free time across a whole degree cohort.

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