TripDate

Inspiration

Funnily, but probably not surprising, our inspiration to develop this project is dating apps and the shared experience of trying to make summer plans with your friends and never agreeing on where to go or when. That's why we were attracted to this challenge and decided to create The Travelapp.

What it does

We have developed an app for mobile phones where people who enjoy traveling or learning about other cultures, can match (as in a dating app) with people who may share similar travel plans and activities. The app recommends other people's profiles ordered according to criteria which consist of whether you will be going to the same places at the same time and whether you have similar interests and budgets.

How we built it

At first moment, it was pretty difficult for us to know how to start, but by the time we started divided the task to make an app into back-end and front-end. The group of back-end has been thinking about the algorithms and how to provide a meaningful match, whereas the front-end group has been designing the website/app to implement all the code provided by the back-end group. After merging all the work, we finished up with a basic app that is pretty useful.

Challenges we ran into

As first-year students and rookies in hackathon competitions, we struggled with almost everything, although that fact didn't stop us. We were determined to deliver a project and that's what we did despite the difficulties. Specifically, we struggle with the lack of sleep and the implementation of artificial intelligence in the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First and foremost, we are proud of ourselves for being able to deliver a project that we started with so little knowledge, and also for our great teamwork cooperation. Secondly, one of the parts of the challenge we are prouder about is the web design of the app and the recommendation algorithm behind it.

What we learned

At the start of this competition, we lacked the knowledge and most of the skills necessary to develop the projects that we had in mind. However, throughout the competition, we were "forced" to learn them, for example, how to use GitHub and its teamwork capabilities (no, really, we had no idea) or how to work with APIs and web design.

What's next for Travelapp

We'd love to continue with this project and develop better ways to match and recommend profiles with similar plans and interests, plus also add new features to the app. Nonetheless, we are also realistic and we know we lack the resources and time necessary to complete our ambitions, but given the opportunity we would take it without thinking.