Let's Link

We're all busy people. Finding times to meet can be hard. Introduce Let's Link, all you do is connect your Google Calendar and we'll provide the most optimal times for you to meet with friends!

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Inspiration

Most of our group members struggle to find good times to link up with our friends. We wanted to create a tool that was easy to access to solve this problem. Thats when we came up with Let's Link. We envisioned a tool to read your calendar and tell you when the most optimal times to meet with your friends are.

What it does

Let's Link simply requires you and your guests to allow Google Calendar read access. From that we read your calendars and determine the most optimal times for all parties to meet, given a time range, event length, and an ideal time of day. We give you as many opportunities as possible for you to pick and link up with your friends!

How we built it

We used React and typescript on the frontend and Next.js for our backend. We used MongoDB for our database. We use Google Authentication and the Google Calendar freebusy api to read calendars using emails. We then wrote an algorithm to interpret and analysis the given calendar data, using a weighting system to determine which times work the best for all participants. We then display those results in beautiful React components for the end user to easily pick the best and easiest times that work for them.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into so many challenges during this hack. First coming up with our idea, Let's Link. We had a few different interpretations and ideas for the project and deciding a path and doable scope for the project was definitely a challenge that we faced. Another big challenge that we ran into was holding sessions and authenticating with Google. As our project requires users to connect their Google accounts to access their calendars, we had to deal with authentication which was often times really buggy and liked to switch up on us, sometimes causing us to get locked out of the web app. Additionally, writing the algorithm to parse and interpret the calendar data proved to be a formidable challenge. Determining how the algorithm should behave and what the algorithm should prioritize was difficult. But ultimately we did prevail in all of our challenges, even if it was 5AM in the morning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud of our awesome UI/UX especially our confetti. We're proud of our resilience against all of our problems and our ability to survive on pure caffeine for almost 24 hours. We're proud of our weighting algorithm and google calendar integration. But most of all we're proud that we got to learn from this project and each other to develop this application.

What we learned

We learned that working together is essential to success. We learned how to problem solve with problems ranging from forgetting to call functions and trouble shooting authentication errors. We learned how to make and design algorithms to optimize computation time and process data.

What's next for Let's Link

We're going to keep working on Let's Link and improve/refine its features and functionality. Our hope is that people will see Let's Link value and start incorporating it into their lives.

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