HuddleUp

Inspiration

Everyone of our group members remembered the stressful first week of trying to find friend groups as freshmen in college. Some of us came in with friend groups and wished to find people with similar interests and others tried to find people to go to the opening week events with or find people in their classes. We realized that there wasn't anything that was built to set up groups of people to go to events.

What it does

HuddleUp is a web application that allows users to post about activities they would like to find a group of people for or join activities they wish to try. Perfect for college campuses such as the University of Pittsburgh, HuddleUp allows users to create and view events in their area and meet new people with similar interests.

How we built it

This web application was built using Flask as a framework with Python, HTML, CSS, SQL, and JavaScript. We started by laying out a website design and going through user functions for creating, editing, and joining posts. We then spent a significant amount of time building the framework for the post functions and creating a tag system to filter posts. We finished by polishing the website layout and working on authorizations of editing posts and viewing profiles.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few significant challenges when working on this project. The first being the tag system that required a significant amount of work to correctly link the sections in Python and HTML. Another problem we faced was our lack of previous experience using SQL and quickly adapting to the language in the short amount of time we were given. A significant challenge throughout many steps of the project implementation was merging sections worked upon by each of the group members.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To start out with, as a group, we are proud to have finished Nhu, Rachel, and Alex's second hackathon and Emma's fourth hackathon. We also are proud to have a working web application about a project we are interested in and gaining more knowledge using Flask and building projects overall.

What we learned

We first all learned to use SQL as this project is our collective first time using the programming language. As a group, we also all learned more about the intricacies of Flask, HTML, and CSS, and Emma had to completely learn the three as she previously used other frameworks for her previous hackathons.

What's next for HuddleUp

If given more time, HuddleUp would first have comments implemented under each post to respond to the user's initial message. We may also have added pinned locations for our location feature to create more user friendly features such as linking to a maps app if needed.