Ani x Mate

Inspiration

As a team of random college students, we really wanted to build a project that we all had an interest in and would have fun with. After taking a quick glance at each other's water bottles, laptops, and bags, we started to bond over our goofy little anime stickers. Which ultimately led us to build an application regarding anime.

What it does

Our project, Ani x Mate, provides our users with amazing anime recommendations that they will surely love.

How we built it

We built Ani x Mate through the use of many web technologies, starting with python web scraping to scrape our user's anime history on MyAnimeList.net. Then using Jikan's anime API we retrieved anime recommendations our users would for sure love. Inputting all of this information into our dear CockroachDB's serverless SQL database to store and generate Animes that the user has not watched yet. Rendering our data with the help of Flask and React.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding an idea that did not seem too ambitious yet too simple. Especially as this was our first time ever participating in a Hackathon, we really struggled since the beginning with planning, structure, and foresight.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we are most proud of for Ani x Mate is our well-designed front-end interface. We believed in simplicity as well as fun colors and designs to make our users feel welcome! Another accomplishment we are proud of is how much we were able to learn from the last 2 days. Although we are new in our own ways, we were able to teach each other new technologies and ways of thinking resulting in a net positive relationship throughout our team.

What we learned

As a team, we learned the importance of having a plan as well as assigning designated roles to each member. By carefully managing your team, it is possible to make everyone useful and happy, allowing for positive vibes like what we shared during our adventure at this hackathon.

What's next for Ani x Mate

Currently, we are using demo data as it would take too long to create an adequate web scraper to grab the user's anime history. So hopefully in the future, we are able to implement this process as well as maybe some other components as well.