Mingly

Ready to mingle but still worried about COVID? Mingly creates an inclusive hangout space, connecting folks both in-person and virtually! With Mingly, you can host, attend, and monitor all your events!

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Inspiration

As first-year international students at Columbia arriving in NYC during the pandemic, we wanted to connect with other students without jeopardizing anyone's safety. We also had trouble finding a centralized platform where lowkey gatherings such as movie nights and picnics could be organized. Our goal is to create a place where anyone who might be bored or lonely can go to and meet.

What it does

  • Provides a platform where users can sign in and host or join events

  • Allows users to keep track of their hosted and attending events

  • Users can decide what kind of event they wish to create by specifying parameters such as group size and virtual/in-person

  • Events can be filtered by group size or mode of meeting (i.e., in-person or virtual) -- Perfect for when you need to social distance!

How we built it

Mingly is a web application built with JavaScript, CSS, and React on the client-side, with the back-end service created with Express.js server, Node.js, and PostgreSQL database.

Challenges we ran into

As this was our first Hackathon, we ran into some (fun and exciting!) challenges with establishing git workflow and collaborating on a single codebase. It was also our first time building a full-fledged app with React-Router-Dom and React Hooks, which posed some challenges with re-routing and re-rendering components of our pages.

Time constraint was also a big limitation as we could not add in all the features that we would have liked to, fixed our bugs or polished our final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud that Mingly is a full-stack application, with a well thought-out front-end and back-end architectures. While creating Mingly, we tried our best to design an organized and well-designed file-system, which would make it easier for us and other developers to continue building and polishing Mingly. Most of all relevant features that make Mingly stand out have already been implemented and ready to be delivered.

What we learned

We've learned greatly about git, git workflow, and team collaboration. Our team consists of two developers who are not familiar with the same stacks and technologies, so it was a great opportunity for us to quickly adapt and learn. Tools such as React-Router-Dom and React Hooks were also very new to us, but by consulting the documentations, we were able to figure out how to integrate them to our application, making Mingly even more functional and exciting!

What's next for Mingly

Mingly is a full-stack application ready to be polished and expand! As the developers of Mingly, we are excited to continue refining the current features, fixing bugs, adding new components, and eventually deploying and optimizing Mingly! We've also set up a basic testing architecture, hoping to add both unit and integration tests to fine-tune Mingly's performances.

Track(s)

Beginner (We're first-timers!) but our theme is Connectivity!

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