UniConnect

A community app connecting college students based on shared skills and interests for academic and personal projects. App lets users post, match with other users and chat with them too!

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Inspiration

I was trying to find team mates for my hackathon. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a good match as I was looking for partners with a particular set of skills. This gave me an idea to build a social/community app for colleges and institutions called UniConnect.

What it does

UniConnect was made with the sole purpose of building communities and letting people from the same institution with similar interest to connect. Lets say you want to play soccer this weekend. You can post on the app saying that you plan to play soccer this weekend. UniConnect smartly shows the post to other people of your school who have an interest in sports. If they like the post, you get to connect with them. The use case of UniConnect is very wide, it can be used to connect people who are interested in music, dancing, outdoor activities, or studying.

You log in to UniConnect using your .edu email id. UniConnect uses this to verify that you study at that particular University. Now, you get to create a profile for yourself in UniConnect which involves a witty bio, your hoobies/interests, links to portfolio's etc. Upon creating a profile on the app, UniConnect lets you post on the app. Only student/members of the institution that you are part of would be able to see the post. UniConnect also filters and shows you posts based on the listed interests and hobbies in your profile. You can like and dislike posts. If you like a post, UniConnect would let you chat and connect with the post owner.

How I built it

I used Flask for the backend, React.js and bootstrap for the front end, and mongoDB Atlas to store the data

Challenges I ran into

I wanted to be able to host it on google cloud services. But unfortunately due to time constraints and working solo, I was not able to achieve it. It is currently hosted locally. But I will definitely host it on GCS as soon as I can

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I got to work with react for the first time. I do not have a lot of experience with front end technologies. It was a great learning experience. I was also excited to use mongoDB Atlas

What we learned

React.js, mongoDB Atlas, and learned to build apps with love and passion for the idea/project

What's next for UniConnect

There is a lot of ways I can imagine to expand UniConnect capabilities. Initially, I would work on hosting it on GCS and also making it compatible with mobile phones

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