Springboard (っ˘ω˘ς )~

Hello World, this is springboard
mentors sign up on the darkside
business(wo)men start posting
Students, hurry! oops you just missed a match, next one in 5, 4, 3 ....
Chose your FIGHTER
Ooo, you got a match
Handful of cards, only one chose, pick wisely
Curious little bean sprout
SpringBoard says hi
Mr Bezzos wants you to build something
The wise wizard always there to help and guide

Inspiration

THE CS MARKET IS COOKED. Or, at least it feels like it is. This project was based off the convo's I've had with my friends about the state of the job market and the barriers that are in place for getting that first internship experience. The 2 common paths right now for students are: moving to tech hubs like SF or NYC for networking + opportunities (like this hackathon!), or embarking on the high learning curve and unstructured nature of open-source and personal projects to build up their experience.

What it does

Springboard is a three-sided marketplace designed to launch tech careers and uplift local communities. Its core functionality begins with a tailored onboarding application where users sign up as a Student, Mentor, or Business.

During onboarding, our platform intelligently gathers the key criteria for a successful match:

Students detail their learning goals and desired tech stack.

Mentors specify their areas of expertise and availability.

Businesses describe their project needs (we even include a tool to help them summarize their use case and identify the right tech).

Once onboarded, our matching logic connects these three groups based on shared interests, skills, and availability. Users are then directed to a role-specific dashboard where they can view their matches, manage their projects, track their progress, and begin collaborating.

This system provides a win-win-win: Students get a guided, impactful project for their portfolio, businesses get valuable tech solutions, and mentors get the fulfillment of shaping a student's future.

How we built it

Springboard was built as a full-stack web application using a modern tech stack.

Frontend: We used React and TypeScript to build a modern, component-based, and type-safe user interface.

Backend & Database: We chose Supabase as our all-in-one backend. This provided us with a powerful PostgreSQL database, real-time data subscriptions, and robust authentication to manage our user profiles, roles, projects, and matching logic.

Styling: We used Tailwind CSS to rapidly build a beautiful, responsive, and dark-mode-compatible design system from scratch.

Design: We mapped out our user flows and designed key components in Figma before a single line of code was written.

Challenges we ran into

RSL: It's generally a feature used by Superbase to prevent scraping. With us using a python script, that called the database often, RSL became a big problem debugging it
Merge conflicts: a lot of people working on the code made conflicts annoying and often

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The design and mascot: We spent a lot of time making sure the design was minimal but also fun and designed a fun mascot to go with the app to give it personality.
We accomplished more than we thought we would based on the time