Log In Page
Lobby - Burnaby Campus
Lobby - Surrey Campus
Lobby - Vancouver Campus
Create a New Gathering
Gathering Chat

SFUnify

The easiest and most seamless way to connect with the SFU community

Inspiration

We’ve all been there - stuck at SFU at 10am in the morning, waiting 8 hours for your next class because the wonderful folks in Administration decided that a 4 hour lecture at 6pm was a good idea.

You think to yourself - huh, I really spend a lot of time here at school. Maybe you should join clubs? Go out and try and make friends?

This isn’t just a small minority of students feeling this way. In 2015, 64 per cent of post-secondary students surveyed by Stats Canada reported feeling “very lonely”. Another 55 per cent cited a combination of several factors — including school work, trouble with interpersonal relationships, and living alone for the first time — as the main cause of their struggles with isolation and, in severe cases, depression. These numbers have gotten nothing but worse since the start of the pandemic.

What it does

Enter SFUnify - a social gathering website designed specifically for SFU students to fill in those empty blocks between classes with new friends and experiences.

The idea is simple - You can either create a post on the gathering board, and fill it in with things to do or people you’re looking to meet, or look through all open posts for something fun currently happening in the community. Once you join a gathering room, you are greeted with a realtime chat of future friends with similar interests.

How we built it

Through over 6 hours of idea brainstorming and roughly 35 hours of delirious hallucinations and React tutorials, this project was brought together using a wide range of technologies including Figma, Node.js, React, Sass, Google Firebase and Cloud, Domain.com, Pusher Realtime API, Heroku, and many more that we are too sleep deprived to remember.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced was to come up with an idea that felt original, useful, and easily accessible. The next challenge that we faced after coming up with our idea was to figure out exactly how it would work and function, in terms of the layout, and matchmaking and room systems. What ensued was 6 hours of discrete mathematics trying to come up with the most efficient algorithms for matching those with similar interests.

We gave up and decided to make the people match themselves.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what's next for SFUnify

In our time with the project we have been able to implement the vast majority of the features that we envisioned it would have. If we had more time, there are a few things that we would like to add including login verification using SFU emails to verify everyone on the chat is a student, more specific tags and filters to better define the activities they want to conduct, and system-generated ideas for activities to do at each of the 3 SFU campuses.

Overall this was a great learning experience for all of us, but more so that it is an example of how much we’ve grown since we started programming, or even since StormHacks from last year. SFUnify.space is online now and we all truly hope that you give it a try.