Nandemo

chat demo

Inspiration

We built Nandemo to address the growing issue of social isolation among students across college campuses in America. For Computer Science students especially, who are often more introverted, meeting peers and engaging with peers can seem daunting. We sought to create a web app that promotes and incentivizes interaction among young people in a shared community like a college campus.

What it does

Nandemo allows users to propose and vote on topics of interest, e.g., linear algebra study group or Leetcode practice problems. These chatrooms are disabled until they receive a certain threshold of votes, and each user has a limited number of votes that can be applied to chats at a given time. Chatrooms that meet the vote prerequisite are read-only for most of the day, except for a time period of a couple of hours set by the topic proposer. Users who seek to discuss in a chatroom must do so before its timer expires (locking it until the next day), creating demand and urgency to utilize the service.

How we built it

We build Nandemo from the ground up, first implementing our database schema, user accounts, and chats. We then slowly integrated chat features, and tested their utility.

Challenges we ran into

Each of us used new technologies, giving us some difficulty in learning and applying them to our project. Additionally, piecing everyone's work together was a challenge towards the end, as we had worked separately on the "components" of our app. These issues, in combination with bugs inevitable in development, created a challenge in creating Nandemo, but we overcame it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of learning new technologies, and working together as a team to create something larger. Each team member had varying levels of experience, and being able to delegate responsibilities while still enabling every member to leave Hack_NCState with greater development knowledge is something we are proud of.

What we learned

Robert - Learned React and some PostgreSQL for creating chats and the side interface Jaden - Learned to care less about perfection and more about shipping something reasonably. Phillip - Flask, utilizing libraries, and HTML for managing user accounts Raven - Flask, Python, Bootstrap, GitHub