Migrant Mingle

A digital gathering place where first-generation low-income immigrant students can mingle, exchange family recipes, get in touch with others, and update their statuses to maintain a sense of security

Comment

Migrant Mingle- Cultivating Connections, Celebrating Voices.

A digital gathering place where first-generation low-income immigrant students can mingle, exchange family recipes, get in touch with others, and update their statuses to maintain a sense of security in order to thrive in their new study environments.

Inspiration

When we started this project, we realized the challenges faced by these students can sometimes be overwhelming. They often feel isolated, lacking the supportive network that their peers might have. That's where Migrate Mingle comes in.

What it does

At Migrant Mingle, we have crafted an online sanctuary dedicated to the narratives of first-generation, low-income immigrant students. The site provides a community hub for first-generation immigrants to share their stories by setting up profiles and creating/posting stories. These stories are shared across the platform where anyone can read, learn, and be inspired to contribute.

What Sets Us Apart:

Unlike other social platforms or micro-blogging services, Migrant Mingle is aimed at providing a safe space for immigrants to share their identities and stories in a way where only those with such an experience would understand. The app focuses on community building and cross-culture sharing, where the immigrant experience is the common thread, but with an understanding that most cultures of the world have experienced migration at some point. Also, ideas a feature for sharing recipes is a simple but unique way to extend the cultural interactivity.

How we built it

The site was built with a NextJS, Tailwind, Firebase/Firestore stack. We started by looking at some wireframes to get a basic idea of how to layout the pages we wanted. The agreed-upon theme was integrated into a basic design system with tailwind, setting theme colours and fonts globally. The pages were created as server-side components using next's new app router. We relied on templates for starting points for the layout and design, but then used a combination of tailwind and the inline style prop to customize everything. For the backend, firebase was setup along with a connection to a firestore database. We used the modular firestore web api to fetch data and make post requests without a real need to have our own api setup. Also, we made use of the onSnapshot listener from firestore to listen to real-time changes in the db and update the view accordingly. Finally, deploying to Vercel was logical and smooth considering that the hosting platform is wired up well for next projects.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble connecting and being on the same page during the entire hackathon because our team members were from different time zones but we solved this problem very soon by dividing tasks effectively. Also for most of our members few of the tools mentioned above were new to them due which it took a lot of time to build the initial barebone of our project and in bringing all of the team members on the same page. In addition to this we also had trouble implementing OAuth in our project and also in creating an effective design template and theme to work upon. But in the end, we did surely come up with the purple theme, which represents inclusiveness and diversity due to its combination of the warm color, Red and the cool color, Blue, representing the coming together of different elements.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

One of our major achievements is that we were able to effectively plan, work strategically in such a less time and present you all with our basic barebone of this idea- Migrant Mingle, despite being time zones apart with one another; we were able to effectively deliver the MVP of our idea. In addition to this we are proud of making something useful and impactful for our society. Moreover our novice team members acquired experience with working new technologies like Next.js to which they were widely unfamiliar. We had such a great time connecting with such amazing people from the Empower Hacks team and with their Discord community, with whom we had great time connecting and attending live hack sessions by Empower Hack team with. Moreover we got the opportunity to learn from more experienced team members in our team and in the Empower Hacks Discord Server.

What we learned

Building a business/app/website/idea from scratch in a weekend is a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. It is surprising what can be achieved when everyone in the team is clear on the objectives and working on their own strengths. The main take-away from this is to start with simple tools and work up from there. Frameworks and such are nice for building fast, but in order for everyone to contribute, it's okay to go simple: even basic Html, and css, as long as the idea is there.

What's next for Migrant Mingle

  • Successful OAuth implementation
  • Recipe of the Day Page
  • Search Feature
  • Chat Feature
  • Location share and Map feature

Team

Built With

Share this project:

Updates