Walendar

Login page
Profile home page
Group planning page

Inspiration

Having been cooped up in quarantine for what seems like an eternity, we’ve personally experienced the difficulty of coordinating a time for a group of friends to catch up virtually. For more formal conference calls, When2Meet is a good solution. It’s simple and gets the job done, but is not very casual or conducive to personal use. When’s the last time you sent a When2Meet to your friends?

What it does

Walendar is an intuitive scheduling app that streamlines event planning and group hangouts by simplifying the planning process.

Each user can enter the app either by setting up an account, or directly entering a group planning page via a private link. Accounts and private information are optional, but give users the ability to pre-input their “weekly schedule” to indicate when they are generally free. This will initialize into any group calendar that they are added to. Users can also connect their account with Google Calendar to be merged with their “weekly schedule.”

Each group page can be accessed either directly via link, or through a user’s home page. On the group planning page, users can make changes to their availability and view a compiled calendar to find times to meet.

How we built it

We built a web application hosted on Heroku. We used Figma to design and prototype, then built it in HTML/CSS. Data was stored on Google’s Cloud SQL and pipelined into the project using node.js and a postgreSQL package. We also used the Google Calendar API to integrate Google Calendar into our app.

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately :’( we did not finish our app. We weren’t successful in connecting Cloud SQL to our application. Our main challenge was in connecting to the Cloud SQL instance through Node.js.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Our team didn’t have extensive hackathon experience, so we were proud of being able to divide and conquer! We were all on task and motivated throughout the project, and stayed communicative with hourly check-ins between our front and back-end teams.

What we learned

On the front-end side, we were happy to be able to apply our current coursework in web development to build the website. Building out a Figma prototype greatly helped us envision how the design would look and what the user experience would be.

On the back-end side, we learned about database design and how databases integrate into web applications. Also we learned that APIs are really confusing sometimes :’(

What's next for Walendar

Integrate database with front end so that pre-populated weekly schedule flows into the group scheduling page and shades in regions of the group calendar. Implement importing calendars functionality to simplify a user’s setup.