Stunite

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Inspiration

After a thorough search about struggles of Stony Brook students, we got to know most of them find it really difficult to make friends on campus and are struggling to find people with similar interests in extra curriculars as well as academics. We wanted to find a way to better connect people, since we as international students relate a lot more to the troubles, and remove the stereotype that SBU does not have a buzzing social life. With Stunite, we will facilitate dialogue between like minded individuals and a bond on the foundation of common interests. Stunite is inspired by popular Gen-Z apps like Hinge and Tinder. This makes the webapp super easy to use since students are familiar with such platforms. Our mission through Stunite is to accommodate the diversity at SBU, ensure inclusivity and overall make the SBU community better knit.

What it does

Stunite is a webapp that allows SBU students to connect. It asks the student to login with their SBU email only which ensures authenticity and makes the networking process safe and eliminates any fake profiles. The students are then directed to create a profile where they are asked a number of questions which enables matching with people with similar interests easier. After completing their profiles, they are taken to a feed page where they can like profiles of students they would like to connect with. If a person receives a like on their profile and they like the other person's profile in return, both their social media information is revealed and they can contact each other through social media.

How we built it

Stunite was built using modern web technologies to ensure a fast, reliable, and intuitive experience. We developed the webapp using Next.js for its efficient server-side rendering and dynamic routing capabilities. For our backend, we chose Supabase, which provided us with a robust, scalable database and built-in authentication features that were essential for managing SBU-specific user sign-ins with their institutional emails. Our code is managed on GitHub and we integrated CI/CD pipelines to streamline our development process, ensuring that every update was automatically tested and deployed on our hosted domain.

Challenges we ran into

Scaling Stunite in a short time period put us in many technical, collaborative, and big-picture challenges. As a team, especially in combining code among many developers, meant there were daily merge conflicts. Having open communication channels and robust version control practices was key to keeping everything humming along. Beyond the technical challenges, the high-energy atmosphere meant being flexible and good at learning quickly, which was infuriating at times. On the technical side, two of our developers were complete beginners to Next.js, so getting them up to speed meant a lot of mentorship and hands-on debugging. We encountered a variety of technical challenges such as hydration errors—common in server-side rendered applications—that needed to be addressed with care so that there is seamless interactivity on the client side.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite these flaws, we are very proud of what we have been able to accomplish in such a short time. We managed to deploy a professional-grade application that meets but well exceeds expectations for performance and user interface. With the use of free tools and open-source utilities, we were able to get the product out at a low cost without compromising a good product based on the actual needs of the SBU community. Our journey fostered significant team building and collaboration, allowing us to tackle technical and holistic problems both. In the end, Stunite's user-centric design is a testament to our commitment and resilience in creating a platform that really unites students.

What we learned

During the course of creating Stunite, we gained invaluable experience in both technical and people skills of developing a contemporary web application. We discovered that technical skills are only as good as communication and teamwork. Merging conflicts, debugging hydration issues, and managing authentication taught us the importance of solid version control and agile troubleshooting. In addition, our experience also taught us the importance of flexibility—balancing a rate of rapid development with good quality work—and accommodating team members with varying skill levels. This has reinforced that resolving both technical and people issues of teamwork is crucial to delivering a successful product.

What's next for Stunite

After some more developments, we see Stunite increasing social engagement in the SBU community. Our vision is to create a positive attitude of SBU students towards social life and give them hope that they can find someone they can share their college experience with. We Stuniters will continue to strive hard to make user experience better by implementing advance features in the webapp like Messaging in the webapp itself and tailoring the FYP more towards user preferences. Our long term goal is to go beyond SBU and provide our platform to other universities so that they can also enhance their student network and configure Stunite according to their likes and preferences which will also include our team working collaboratively with external teams.