Inspiration
Offices around the world are opening back up, and with that, you'll be meeting many of your co-workers for the first time in real life 😱
I only see the same faces over and over again during my workday, and I always wanted a way to get to know more of my co-workers and remember their faces before we bumped into each other over coffee.
What it does
WhoDat is a competitive game where you'll be viewing short videos your co-workers have produced describing something about themselves, their favorite food, or ideal vacation spot, or the best decade, you get the idea - and you need to guess who they are without hearing or seeing their name.
Guess enough co-workers correctly and you'll be on top of the real-time leaderboard. Miss one and you'll be trying again.
Of course, you will have the opportunity to fill out your very own profile including recording up to 5 videos that will be randomly shown to your colleagues.
WhoDat was designed to go viral within an organization. Within an hour of casually dropping a link in our #random Slack channel, I had 25 of my co-workers sign up. I'm now working with our Chief of Staff and People team to do a more official roll-out. Let the Loom evangelism begin!
How we built it
Loom's new SDKs power both the video recording and video playback portions of the app. The fact that users can create and upload video content with no extension or downloaded apps is just amazing.
The overall web application was built using Next.JS as the Web Framework, and Firebase as the database and authentication layer, to power things like the real-time leaderboard in the game. I chose MaterialUI as the React Component Library and went for a minimal, flat design that would be clean, but without a lot of design skills needed (I'm missing a few of those).
Netlify made the upload and deployment process trivial to do, basically just one click after adding in my environment variables!
Challenges we ran into
It was both my first time using Next.js, as well as my first time using Firebase since it basically came out and I was in college doing hackathons (7 years ago?) Next.js made a pretty easy start, but I don't think I'm fully taking advantage of all the cool features it has built-in. Firebase + React's state management + the random nature of the game was, well, non-trivial to get right. There's still work I want to do to improve the state management and authentication layer (users still get flashes of the non-logged out content when first logging in, at least as of writing this)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Namely, I'm proud that it actually works! This project really came together for me and shaped up better than I could have imagined it.
What's next for WhoDat
The basic principles of WhoDat don't need to change much, but the user experience can be continually refined. I would like to pass over the entire app with someone truly knowledgeable in design to take it to the next level as my top priority. Re-doing the authentication layer and making the state management more clear would be next. Lastly, there are features like "Teams" within organizations, inviting users across organizations, etc. that could help facilitate a more broad set of connections at work and outside of work.
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