Mentors Connect

Inspiration

With a group of first years (and a second year), we wanted to build a full-stack web application that allows mentors and users to connect together one-to-one asynchronously in various course topics.

What it does

Currently, we have only implemented the back-end of the project where we created a relational database that stores data about users, messages, and a list of courses.

How we built it

As of right now, we only built our application using PostgreSQL and Python.

Challenges we ran into

We initially wanted to use CockroachDB as a back-end, but we were having technical difficulties with trying to use it, so we ended up using PostgreSQL as our back-end. However, that in itself proved to take the majority of our day trying to get everybody set up with trying to connect psycopg2 with postgre. After that, we started designing what our tables would look like and started learning how to use SQL.

We believe that we would have gotten relatively far into the project towards the front-end of the application given that we didn't have a ton of difficulties trying to set up Postgres on everybody's machines.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The most that we have gotten throughout the entire hackathon is learning a little bit more about the processes of full-stack development, and the amount of knowledge that it takes to be able to build one. We believe all of us have learned something about how relational databases work, how to use version control, and also work with one another.