ZotWithU

Inspiration

For a lot of students, coming to university can be a bittersweet thing. Important education and opportunities are gained, while some deep high school bonds are weakened and sometimes even lost. ZotWithU was made to fix that problem, and helps rebuild those deep connections undergraduates and upper classmen alike lost in their transition to university.

What it does

ZotWithU lets users assign their role, and get matched with other like-minded people through those roles. The gimmick of the app is that matched groups are random, which saves the user from worrying about who to talk to. Users are then invited to a group, and can see the date and time for when the event will take place.

How we built it

We built this app on Swift, and with Python for backend. We utilized AWS for handling API and the database (With Lambda and Dynamo respectively). We used XCode and Visual Studio Code for coding.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first hackathon, and a lot of the time was spent on figuring out how the backend would operate. We weren't able to finish a big part of the features mentioned in the sections above due to a problem with link payloads on endpoints. Surprisingly, most other aspects of the application were smooth - Swift development was quite simple given XCode's active display, and teamwork ended up going well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even though we did not actually manage to link the client-side with API, we still actually set up the API, and managed to make it functional by itself. Making the application was also a big feat for us, since we don't have much experience in design. If we hadn't ran into the roadblock of payloads, we would have been able to implement a lot more features such as name-verification API from Melissa, google maps location recommendations, etc., so we're still pretty proud of what we did.

What we learned

We feel this project introduced us to a new layer of programming, and the difference between software 'writing' and software 'development'. We certainly had the understanding that things might not go to plan, and going through the steps of writing this app showed us there is no silver bullet (Even spending an all-nighter writing a requirements document)

What's next for ZotWithU

ZotWithU will absolutely continue development. The constraints of this Hackathon were time and time only. We will be able to make the transfer protocol functional AND secure, and we will flesh out the app to offer a great experience to UCI students.