Inspiration
Every day, college students are faced with the challenge of scheduling meetings. With a busy day and many different activities to keep track of, fitting in a meeting or hangout into students’ busy schedules can be like trying to hit a bullseye on a dart board.
As students ourselves, we face this issue on the daily. Whenever our teams or friends want to meet up, it’s such a pain to schedule a time that works with everyone’s schedules. The current solution to this problem is to either suggest a variety of times and hope that one works or to use tools like when2meet. However, both of these solutions cause a shared sense of annoyance within the student body because of their inefficiency. Whenever a team wants to meet for a project or to talk about any important updates, a new when2meet has to filled out and everyone has to check between their calendar and the when2meet many times in order to fill out the times accurately.
The current tools that aid in scheduling for college students are extremely inefficient and thus we were motivated to find a new improved solution.
What it does
There are three main features that we’ve distilled our app into:
- Creating and scheduling meetings - Users are also able to create meetings and share via link or through friends. Other people can then join the meeting and it’ll automatically add their blocked out times from their calendar. We also allow users to compare their schedules with their friends automatically by just simply typing their name.
- Sending schedules - We give users the ability to send specific availability with blocked out times via text/link to anyone that they wish to schedule a meeting/hangout with. We automatically sync with the user’s Google Calendar so that they don’t have to go through the entire process of manually listing out the times they're available every time they want to schedule a meeting.
- Social feature - Many people that we’ve interviewed expressed that they have interest in what their friends are up to and want to connect with them, but don’t have a clear-cut way of doing so. Some people shared Google Calendars with each other, but that requires a level of transparency that most people aren’t willing to share. So, by allowing users to friend people, we enable them to create a network of people that they can easily schedule hangouts/meetings with and view their availability.
How we built it
First, we mocked up our designs of all the functionality that we wanted on figma. After we had the general designs, we built the frontend using Vue.js with Tailwind and Vuetify to help with the styling. For the backend, we used Go to create our web server, utilizing the Gin web framework and Go's mongodb driver to interface with our database.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a variety of challenges during our process, some logistical and some technical. First of all, we worked in different geographical locations and thus it was more difficult to sync up and delegate work accordingly. Also, since none of us had experience with Go before, we experienced some difficulty implementing it at first, but then due to the comprehensive documentation we were able to figure out everything pretty swiftly. We also had a big challenge of figuring out the scope of our project and what exact problem we should tackle. After some market research interviews, we distilled the issues of scheduling into three top problems and then aimed to solve each of them with one general solution.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re really proud of the unique way that we used Go and were able to integrate it into our platform. We’re also proud of the intuitive and sleek design that we came up with and developed.
What we learned
None of us knew Go before this hackathon, so we spent hours scouring tutorials on the internet, learning not only the syntactical elements of this programming language, but also how to use packages such as Gin to create a fully featured REST API. Coming from mostly Javascript backgrounds, this was certainly an exciting challenge for us.
What's next for Schej.it
There are lots of areas where Schej.it can expand. On the development side, we are planning to make the backend more robust and implement compatibility with other calendar apps. We are also planning to add/experiment with new features such as the ability to create groups so that you can set up meetings without having to ask the same people over and over to fill out their information about when they are free. We also plan to implement more customizability. For example, if someone didn’t want their friends to know when they were busy or not, they could put themselves in invisible mode.
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