Hackmates

Inspiration

After observing the flow of Hackathon participants struggling to find a team, we decided to build a web application that can help remediate this struggle and make future Hackathons better by making it easy to find teammates.

What it does

The application takes in the user's information about their coding skills, programming languages, work habits, in-person/remote preferences, personality type, and other factors. With these participants in the database, a matching algorithm finds other participants that have compatible characteristics in a team project setting.

How we built it

We build the frontend questionnaire using React, Python, and Flask to pull information from the form and store it in a database created with MongoDB. We used Python to implement the matching algorithm and store the results in the database.

Challenges we ran into

React and Flask were two technologies that were unfamiliar to our team, so we ran into issues when learning their intricacies. Figuring out how to pull information from the React frontend into the database using Flask ended up taking more time than originally projected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we persisted through the hardships that came with learning new technologies and were able to utilize them well enough to create a product that accomplished the goals we set out to reach.

What we learned

We all gained experience in creating a user-based web application with database support, and gained skills in using Flask, React, and MongoDB. We also learned about the team-project collaborative pipeline necessary to create such an application efficiently and in a timely manner.

What's next for Hackmates

We created HackMates with the future in mind. It lays a foundation that can be adapted to fit any teambuilding application, even outside the Hackathon. Also, the more Hackathon participant data that is aggregated in the database over time gives it the potential to become more useful and efficient in creating matches for future participants.