Flyng

Where friendships take off.

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Inspiration

Everyone has had a similar experience at the airport: show up two or three hours early only to get through check in and security in fifteen minutes. Now, all there is to do is to wait around with nothing to do. But what if that could change? Flyng is a web based application that connects people in airports who are waiting for boarding or for layovers. Airports serve as some of the most unique and diverse locations on Earth and the potential for connections is unlimited. Flyng serves as the bridge, filling those normally mundane wait times with lasting memories and connections.

What it does

Flyng is a Cross-Platform Website built off of Google Cloud designed to find and connect people in airports waiting at similar times. Flyng allows for profile creation and customization with interests as well as login credentials. From there the application will connect your profile to other profiles in the airport at the same time based on your flight number. Not only does Flyng suggest the best meeting locations, it also proposes activities to do with others at your arrival location.

How we built it

We acquired ownership of the flyng.live domain from GoDaddy and hosted our website with Google Cloud Run, with files saved in Google Cloud Storage. All the front-end HTML/CSS and JavaScript code was made completely from scratch without any pre-made templates. Our front-end communicates with both a backend Python server we developed with our own custom RESTful API and hosted on Heroku, as well as a variety of Custom Node.js Endpoints hosted via Cloud Functions. Our backend server is tasked with getting real-time flight data from AviationStack API, generating LLM responses for suggested meeting spots between two airport gates with Google Generative AI API, and querying our Google Cloud MySQL database for other users who could be potential matches.

Challenges we ran into

None of our group had any experience setting up or hosting a website on Google Cloud. We ran into issues figuring out how to send updates to the website from our HTML, JS, and CSS files through Github. We also ran into issues connecting the front end and back end as we had many moving parts. It was difficult hosting the backend server as none of us had any experience doing it before. We also had to come up with a creative work around for finding a way to store a global variable across the HTML pages as the username did not save when iterating across the different pages.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re very proud of how cohesive the different parts of the entire project came together as for most of the hackathon we all worked on separate parts of the project using very different languages and applications. While we did run into some issues connecting everything together, all our issues were resolved and Flyng works just as we had intended. We initially had issues regarding data privacy, due to the passwords and personal information we were maintaining in our databases. By configuring our Cloud Setup, we created a Firewall and added encryption to make sure everyone's data is safe.

What we learned

We learned the technicalities of how each component of a web application communicates with each other and how to run services virtually. We learned how to host everything remotely, update code through the Google CLI, and configure the DNS.

What's next for Flyng

Because we already have the full stack running and accessible anywhere in the world, next steps include new features(such as an in web chat function) and builiding up our user database. Since Google Cloud can be scaled infinitely, most of the work lies in the marketing and promotion of our website.

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