HoosTogether

Home page where users can join or create an event
Join page where users input phone number
Event successfully created page
Create page for event
A reminder for the event you joined

Inspiration

Coordinating meetups with friends can often be a hassle. Everyone needs to agree on a time, and after that, everyone needs to remember when it’s going to happen. HoosTogether simplifies all that by allowing someone to quickly create an event at a specific time and invite others to join it. HoosTogether manages the rest, sending automated reminders to everyone who’s coming.

What it does

HoosTogether allows users to create events, specifying the name, date, and time. After creating an event, the user receives a join code and a join link that they can send to friends. Their friends can then join the event and HoosTogether will send automated reminders about the event to them.

How we built it

HoosTogether was built using Django, which managed both rendering the front-end view and the backend logic. The automated messaging was accomplished using Twilio’s SMS API.

Challenges we ran into

Time formatting was a challenge. We had to parse HTML’s datetime format that it sent into a Python datetime object. However, the datetime object would assume that the time zone was UTC, while the actual input was EST. This was solved by offsetting the datetime object and reassigning the time zone.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to successfully call Twilio’s Scheduler API to send SMS messages to users. We’re proud that we were able to draw the architecture and make abstractions of our app to make it easy for everyone to understand and implement.

What we learned

We learned how to set up a web application using the django framework. We created routes in the backend to call Twilio's SMS API and render HTML templates when the user sent specific HTTP Requests. We also learned more about parsing dates and times.

What's next for HoosTogether

We’d like to add user authentication for the person who creates the event in addition to allowing the user who created the event to sent additional reminders with custom messages.