Inspiration
Sometimes the things you most love to do don't always get the most enthusiastic responses from the people you most love to do things with. But the handful of people we spend the most of our time with aren't the only people who would love to have someone to go out with. It's easy to feel awkward about reaching out to your extended network, especially if you've lost touch with them, but if there's an activity you both love to bring you together, you can take the opportunity to do the thing you love and maybe rekindle an old friendship at the same time.
What it does
Joyn is a social media app that enables you to broadcast open invites to people in your extended network. If you can't find enough traction in your immediate friend group, everyone you've added on Joyn, from your cousins in the area, to your group project teammate from two semesters ago, can see that you're looking to find someone to, for example, go shopping with. Your event feed will be filled with the activities everyone else in your network is advertising. If any of them sound interesting to you, sign up! There will also be the option to configure a critical mass, where if not many people are interested, the event doesn't happen, no hard feelings, but if the desired number of people sign up, everyone gets notified to get ready to go out!
How we built it
The frontend is built with React, the backend in Express.js. We used MongoDB Atlas for the database and Clerk for a streamlined authentication and account creation experience.
Challenges we ran into
Going out the gate with authenticated requests proved to be a real challenge, adding complication and delaying the start of connecting up the front and back ends. Also, the decision to go with MongoDB Atlas because of the suggestion of the MLH challenge, rather than a relational database, proved to be a major hindrance when retrieving the events and friends connected to each user.
What we learned
If we were to do it again, we would take a little longer to flesh out what the logic would look like, and what the most logical technology choices for our use case would be, both in terms of the technology (relational vs document store) and in terms of feature prioritization.
Project Members: Max Liu, Tiger Peng, Elliot Roe, Shivam Singh
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