[13] - when to schmeet

Inspiration

We got inspiration from our own campus life — many of us are a part of multiple clubs and organizations on campus. One of the most difficult things to coordinate is everyone’s schedules, and having to switch between tabs to fill out multiple scheduling tools like when2meet is a huge hassle.

What it does

Whentoschmeet allows the user to create groups of people to schedule meetings together with. By clicking "Add Group", you can name an empty group. Then, you can "Add person" to add people to this group. By clicking each group on the left, you can view the people in the group and the schedules of all the people in that group. On the right sidebar, you can select the range of dates you wish to view everyone’s availability as well as range of hours. Each person’s availability will be based on whether there is an event scheduled on their Google Calendar. The specific event is not visible for privacy. The intensity of the colored calendar indicates the number of people that are busy on that date. The more intense the color, the more people are unavailable on that date at that time. After finding a date where most people are available (aka the lightest parts of the calendar), you can click “Add event” in order to send an email to request to schedule a meeting at the desired date and time!

How we built it

We built the frontend with a next.js framework and used tailwind libraries for css. For the backend, we used the Cloud Firestore as our database, Google Calendar APIs to retrieve calendar data, Express.js and Postman.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many issues when setting up the database. It was our first time implementing Cloud Firestore and while we were able to begin writing API endpoints to directly interact with a user’s Google Calendar, we unfortunately ran out of time and couldn’t finish integrating them with the web app UI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most of our team had very little to no experience with the roles that we assigned ourselves because we wanted this to be a learning experience. While our product is nowhere near perfect, we had to break past multiple obstacles and learned a LOT.

What we learned

Our experience is mostly in Python. On this project, I helped my other teammate with frontend development, where I learned HTML, CSS, and Javascript. This was the first time I used these three tools. It was very disorienting to use these languages as I was exposed to it for the first time. However, now I am familiar with how to read and use documentation for frontend development and have a foundation to learn more frontend. We also learned how to create API endpoints in Node.js and express.js.

What's next for um

We want to finish implementing the whentoschmeet API endpoints so that users would be able to actually import their Google calendars onto the application and create new events based on the availability of members in a group.

Similarly, some users have multiple calendars so we want to add a feature which allows the scheduler to select a specific calendar. Additionally, whentoschmeet should be able to be integrated with more various calendar websites for users without Google Calendar.

For larger meetings, whentoschmeet should be able to automatically add all the people within a Google Group for faster, more convenient scheduling.