Lunch Link

Hungry for new connections? Lunch Link helps students find others with similar interests and majors to meet, eat, and connect at dining halls across campus.

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Inspiration

As freshmen in the BU community, we've recently had to navigate a new chapter of our lives filled with the unknown. We left behind the familiar to better our future, but with that comes the fragility of new friendships, and often times, loneliness. However, Lunch Links aims to bridge the gap between students who are looking for those connections by serving as a tool to bring students together during meal times.

What it does

Lunch Links is the web app for students to meet with their peers during meal times. More often than not, students are eating alone in the dining halls due to the vast differences of schedules between each student. However, Lunch Links allows students to create a profile with their interests and majors. Then, when they are on their way or eating at a dining hall, they can match with other active profiles who are planning on eating or are eating at the same time and place. This is a low stakes, flexible way for students to make connections within our community without having to stress about planning long-term meet up with conflicting schedules.

How we built it

To begin, we started by brainstorming broad ideas that could apply to one of the main tracks and side tracks. Once we settled on one idea, we started picturing different aspects we could incorporate into the main idea and drawing out what the final product would look like. From there, we split into two groups: frontend and backend where we started to build the skeleton up while we attended the various workshops to fill in the meat of the web app. Over the course of the hackathon, we delegated tasks between us depending on which side of development needed more assistance.

Challenges we ran into

As freshmen, we had little to no experience in Web Dev, so the learning curve was the biggest challenge we faced. We had the most experience with Java, so we went with the Spring Boot path in order to code the back end with Java. However, we faced numerous obstacles with connecting the Spring Boot package with our project, even with the help of mentors. So, after not making much process for many hours, we decided to pivot to Node.js, meaning we had to learn how to code in javascript as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we're proudest of the amount we have learned in making this project. The amount of experience we have gained with javascript, css, html, react, and more this past weekend is more than could ever be taught in a class. We had to apply ourselves in a real world scenario, teaching us not only the technical skills but also the teamwork, project and time management, and delegation skills that are vital in this industry.

What we learned

On top of the technical skills we learned while coding this program such as javascript, css, html, React, Node.js, and Figma, we also learned lessons in collaboration, how to manage our time and plan projects to be most successful and efficient, and the ins-and outs of teamworks

What's next for Lunch Link

In the future, we wish to develop Lunch Link into a full app and introduce larger databases with students in our community. The first step to doing so is connecting with mentors and resources that would assist us in expanding our knowledge regarding App Development and databases in order achieve what's next in store for Lunch Link.

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