Inspiration
We realized that many UCI students seek out projects to gain experience and develop their portfolios, but many, including us, don't even know where to start to find them. Zoart a Project is a response to that need. We've sough to develop a site that could compile student-led projects and allow for students to efficiently browse and search through those projects that they may have never found otherwise.
What it does
Zoart a Project allows users to upload projects they are working on, along with tags, a description and their contact info, to the site. Other students may then sort through those projects by each tag, allowing for ease of navigation between the projects, and giving them a clear view of the projects they might want to join.
How we built it
When building Zoart a Project, we used TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, React, and Next.JS for the frontend, and we utilized Python, FastAPI, SupaBase, and GeminiAPI for the backend. The searching function works by taking a user input and passing it through the GeminiAPI which then finds the most similar tags in the data base. Once Gemini gets those tags, it returns it to the frontend and the project cards are updated accordingly with those filter tags. We then implemented the upload feature of the site by giving users a space to input information about their projects' titles, tags, descriptions, etc. Once that information is inputted, it is saved to the data base and uploads as a visible project card on the site.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge we ran into was connecting the GeminiAPI responses to the SupaBase filtering, as we split the functionality between two teammates, so trying to interlock the two was a complicated process. Separately, they worked but when we tried to connect them, there were many issues.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of our entirely self-designed UI and our ability to overcome the challenges we faced in the end. Despite not entirely knowing what we were doing, just learning many of these programming tools in the past 24 hours, we were able to come together and create a working, visually appealing site!
What we learned
We learned how to use TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, React, Next.JS, Python, FastAPI, SupaBase, and GeminiAPI to create a working site and program. Before this we've never worked a project of this scale with GitHub in a group, learning how to collaborate in a shared code base was a learning curve, but extremely useful to learn.
What's next for Zoart a Project
There's still many more optimizations in store for Zoart a Project! In the future, Zoart a Project could create users so that they can save, create, and keep track of all the projects they're interested in! As of right now, our project only allows users to browse and search for projects, but implementing users would make things much more personalized.
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