After School

Make meaningful conversations with like-minded people. Stay connected. Stay inspired.

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Inspiration

A while ago, I had a long conversation with one of my friends-- long in a few senses.

The conversation consisted of messages back and forth over the course of 3 weeks, and each message we sent was at least 3-4 paragraphs long.

We've known each other for years, and somehow never got to thoroughly know the other person too deeply until that long conversation allowed us to.

From that experience, I want to create something-- like a social media or messaging app, I am still figuring that out-- to allow other people to share their intimate, deepest thoughts on topics they are passionate about.

After School is the first iteration of that something, built for people who want to avoid the toxicity, judgmental-ness of other social media, or even real-life, and instead want to focus on developing deep, meaningful, and long-term relationships.

What it does

At its core, After School (AS) is a messaging app to connect people with an interest in fashion.

The site allows users to register a profile, then select their favorite fashion designers and brands. From that information, the site connects users to other people with a similar profile, similar "taste" in fashion.

Instead of employing a more traditional instant-messaging approach, AS uses a "long-message" model. Users can only send messages of over 500 characters, which encourages more thoughts to be put into the message, creating a more personal connection with the recipient.

How we built it

AS is mainly built with the Django framework in the backend and html/css/javascript in the frontend.

We deploy the app using Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was the time constraint.

Our team consists of 1 person, so there was a lot of work to be done.

The front-end was also a challenge since our member is more experienced working on the backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to finish most of what we had in mind for AS in just over a day.

What we learned

We learned a lot about Django's more advanced concepts such as class-based-view, overriding class methods, using advanced form/ model fields/ relationships for database creation.

We also strengthened our Python skills through developing under-the-hood operations for AS, using its built-in tools such as difflib and SequenceMatcher objects.

What's next for After School

Next for AS is to finish what we couldn't finish: adding notifications, allowing text posts, adding a photo gallery (very needed for fashion!).

We also want to explore optimizing some backend operations to make AS faster in the grand scheme of things.

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