Unwind, relax, and collaborate with your peers with Happy Hours!
1st Place Winner at Super Hacks 2021!
Lack of social interaction is one aspect of distance learning that has been particularly challenging for students. Since there is no centralized platform (that I know of) that allows for the creation and sharing of "happy hours", meetings that help students relax with their peers, I decided to create one.
Happy Hours is a fully functioning web application. It allows students to create, join, sort through, and search through Happy Hours in an intuitive and user-friendly manner. It also supports light and dark themes to allow for maximum ease of use.
I built Happy Hours with React (w/ TypeScript), Redux, Firebase, and Material UI. React provides the architecture of the application, Redux manages the state, Firebase provides a fully functioning backend and database, and Material UI provides effective styling.
The major challenge I ran into was finishing the application within the time constraint. I had to read a lot of documentation for Redux, Material UI, and Firebase as I was trying different libraries and techniques that I hadn't used before.
I'm proud that I was not only able to finish the application to the point where it's usable but that I was also able to deploy it so that it could actually be used by students.
I learned a lot about different Redux libraries and the pros and cons of them. Initially, I was using plain Redux, but then I switched to Redux-Toolkit which made it a lot easier to quickly write Redux reducers, actions, and selectors. I also learned a lot about domains as I was able to acquire a free domain and connect it with Firebase Hosting.
More features! Some include adding a visibility option to a Happy Hour (public, private, invite-only) and adding the ability to add Happy Hours to calendars (Google, Apple, etc.).