TIFFTok

Making going to film festivals with your friends a little easier.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration came from how we wanted to help manage and easily visualize social events with friends. One of our teammates took an interest in films, and with the Toronto International Film Festival approaching soon, we figured this could be a great opportunity to fill that need. Tools exist already that show film times, but we wanted to add a social aspect where users could directly coordinate with their friends what they're seeing and when – in the high-intensity (and relatively expensive) week that many a Toronto film fan anticipates for September, having more clarity in control would be no small service!

What it does

TIFFTok is a React-based web app that connects to a public list of TIFF 2023 films (and would easily plug into 2024 data as soon as it's fully available), allowing users to find a list of what's playing, and where.

How we built it

We idealized various ideas for a generic event planner web app on the first day; as there was no theme for this hackathon, we instead used our interests- films, to help serve as a basis for our project.

Later on, UIs were drawn up using Figma, and a basic React boilerplate app was created. The front end was mainly done by Derek and Will, the back end by Will and Sana, as well as Niloy worked on integrating Auth0 into our project. We used MongoDB and Python to traverse the data given by the TIFF website, as well as JavaScript, React, and TailwindCSS for the front end. We used AI software like ChatGPT for supplementing debugging alongside our wonderful mentors.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into multiple challenges with Auth0, integrating the backend with the front end, and bugs that were encountered with the event compounded with the short timeframe that we had. We worked as a team, alongside getting help from our mentors, to help resolve these issues to the best of our ability. Ultimately, accommodating for this intense learning experience, we ran out of time within the weekend to actually implement that social aspect, given how innately reliant it is on the technical conventions of wherever user data is stored.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we achieved a good portion of a functional, clean full-stack web app from scratch, especially given our limited hackathon experience. Our team had fantastic chemistry with each other, with tasks being delegated toward our strengths. We constantly tried to mutually facilitate opportunities for each other to learn and to help each other out when appropriate.

Also, learning Auth0 and the general concepts and practices surrounding OAuth has been very interesting. Finding most authentication systems already a little daunting, Auth0 was far removed from any notion we had of how an auth system might integrate with our front-end, back-end and databases. And on the other hand, our experience with MongoDB was virtually painless.

What we learned

We expanded our knowledge in React, TailwindCSS, MongoDB, Auth0, and integrating back-end to the front-end for a full web app. We applied classroom knowledge like object-oriented programming, the user design process, and list traversing to a real-world project. We worked together with Git in a setting akin to workplace software development.

What's next for Tiff-Tok

TIFF's 2024 edition arrives in about a month, making it ideal timing to further pursue this project and expand its functionality in time to be really useful to a small but fervent niche. The aforementioned social element, of directly sharing, comparing and aligning your schedule with a friend's, is very achievable within that amount of time. We also want to improve traversal efficiency, fix bugs and polish the layout, overall just trying to improve the user experience.

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