Hopper Dreams

SBU is great for academics. But it's not exactly known for it's social life. Hopper Dreams aims to foster a more open mindset among SBU's student body through its inviting and inclusive interface.

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Inspiration

It is common sentiment around campus that it is hard to make friends, let alone find a significant other.

What it does

Hopper Dreams functions similarly to Facebook and Tinder, allowing users to create profiles and meet others. Currently, there is functionality for registration, login, and the "swiping" feature offered in many dating apps.

How we built it

We used the MERN stack, which consists of a MongoDB database, Express.js web server, and a Node.js/React.js frontend. Each member specialized in some level of this stack, with half of us focusing on the backend and half of us focusing on the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Most of us were not familiar with the MERN stack, so we had to read documentation and follow tutorials in the first half of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite this being a beginner project, Hopper Dreams has a clean interface, and its use of other technologies is up to industry standards. While most beginner projects focus primarily on functionality and "looking correct", from the start we considered scalability (ex. choice of database) and security (ex. encrypting passwords).

What we learned

All of our team members are relatively new to web development, so we learned the basics of our tech stack: MongoDB, Express web server, React.js, and Node.js. We also reinforced our knowledge of basic web development concepts such as forms, routing, and endpoints.

What's next for Hopper Dreams

First, we want to improve our matching algorithm, which currently matches randomly within one's gender preferences. For example, we can have users optionally upload their schedules, allowing us to match them with other students based on availability (see when2meet).

This scheduling extension would also enable us to arrange blind dates, which was another planned feature that we weren't able to implement in time.

Other critical features we plan on adding in the future are chat rooms, email verification, AI-generated profile descriptions, and reporting harassment or abuse.

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