kevinazhu / la-hacks-2015

MixMi for LA Hacks 2015

Created by Kevin Zhu, Jerry Zhao, Justin Teo, and Alec Brickner

ChallengePost link with video: http://challengepost.com/software/mixmi-z5qft

Inspiration

Often times you find yourself experiencing things with a group of people, but no way to connect to them directly. Anything from being stuck in a class you can’t stand to seeing an amazing event at a stadium, this app has you covered.

How it Works

Create a group chat based on your current location and specify the radius of the group chat. Only those within that area will be able to anonymously connect to your group chat and share the experience with you.

Challenges We Ran Into

As sophomore computer science students, the majority of our team members had little to no experience with web development. Not only did we have to learn and incorporate Node.js, MYSQL, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, and Angular.js on a tight schedule, but we also had to learn the Respoke (for chat) and Geolocation APIs during the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Given that for most of us, this is our first chat application, we are highly proud that we were able to seamlessly incorporate so many technologies and tools together to create a functional and attractive application. We are proud that despite all the challenges we faced, we were able to complete a demo within the duration of the hackathon.

What we learned

Besides having learned the various languages and tools mentioned above, we learned proper version control with Github on such a large scale project. We also learned to be resourceful, learning a relatively new API that had yet to have extensive documentation.

What’s next for MixMi

There are several features we would like to implement but did not have the time to. These include private group chats, security measures, user profiles, and most importantly, a mobile counterpart to MixMi.