Shared Sky

Discover and share with mutuals through a lightweight interface

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Inspiration

On our website, everyone is a planet, and our website, Shared Sky, enables users to customize their own planets. Also, there's a humorous statement online that "Asians are connected by two degrees," meaning that if you were to draw a graph of all Asian people, at most, there would be two people in between any two given people. We wanted to build an application to visualize this on a more general level, leveraging Twitter's API to show mutuals between given users and help users build connections easily.

What it does

Shared Sky allows a user to input their X (Twitter) username and uses their user profile to generate a visual representation of their network. Pulling data from X API, our program builds a star map that allows the user to visually explore and connect with their first and second degree mutuals through planets and constellations, with their strongest connections glowing the brightest.

How we built it

Shared Sky was initially conceived as two separate ideas: a messaging platform and a mutual connections finder. While brainstorming features for these programs, we quickly realized that the two shared several overlapping characteristics, so we thought, Why not build both? Using Figma prototyping and Cursor prompt engineering, we combined the two ideas into one, and thus, Shared Sky was created.

Challenges we ran into

We have a lot of ideas that we hope to actualize on our website, like visualizing mutual connections, sending "meteorites" to friends, and optimizing our backend. But some of them are too time-consuming to achieve, so we chose to focus on the main functions. In particular, we hoped to implement Meta and X APIs in order to have a good grasp on what mutuals the user had. But because of recent privatization and subscription gates, we were not able to access it in time. As a result, we were not able to fully realize that portion of the site. Styling one of the main pages, we encountered difficulties with transitions and the shape of some of the stars we were representing. After much troubleshooting and asking our mentor for help, we eventually resolved the issue by asking Claude in a more exact and concise way. Sometimes the best solutions aren't the most obvious, so we check everything carefully

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As first-time hackathon participants, we’re proud we were able to: Ideate a unique project idea that builds off of an existing program Utilize Figma and Cursor to draft and build our creative vision Implement a functional webpage in 12 hours!

What we learned

Git Version Control Live Collaborative Coding Frontend and Backend Development React and fastAPI Affinity board drafting

What's next for 2nd Degree

Due to the 12 hour time constraint of ZotHacks, we were unable to fully realize our vision for Shared Sky. To complete the project within the allotted time frame, we had to cut out several supplemental features, including a fully functional messaging system that would allow a user to “shoot a meteor” to another user’s planet. This would have been a casual, compact form of offline communication that would aid a user in making new connections. We hope to implement this feature in the future, along with other features we had to abandon due to time constraints.

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