Meerar

An app that helps students discover what they are GOOD at, and what they ENJOY with the help of friends. Gamified!

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Inspiration

I really related to the problem the career councilors described. Reflecting on things can be hard. Especially when you're reflecting on yourself. Our goal is to make this process fun and easy, with a little help from our friends.

What it does

Meerar compares HOW OFTEN you demonstrate a skill, and how much you ENJOY demonstrating it. To elaborate:

  • When ever you engage in an event, Meerar will prompt you take a little note, describing your experience and how you felt.
  • We then use the Lexalytics API to decide how much you enjoyed the event.
  • Your reflection is posted anonymously on ExperienceMine, along with other people's reflections.
  • Here's the twist: other students read your reflection and assign a "skill" that they feel you demonstrated.
  • The more you review and post reflections, the more points you earn. You can earn achievements and compete with your friends like this!
  • At this point, we have 2 pieces of info: how you felt about the event, and what skill you demonstrated at the event. Once you have enough data, we plot a graph that compares HOW OFTEN you demonstrate a skill, and how much you ENJOY demonstrating it, and provide an analysis on you strengths and weaknesses, and recommends events to attend to play to your strengths.

How I built it

I built Meerar with a PHP backend, which is used to store and process user information. The front end was built on the trusty Twitter Bootstrap framework, with bunch of JavaScript libraries sprinkled in (i.e. materialize.js, chart.js). I used the Lexalytics API in order to gauge the sentiment in user's descriptions. I also wrote a little scraper to scrape from LinkedIn profiles of users which I execute with a bash script (what can I say, I'm learning). It's a bit patchwork-ish, but it works!

Challenges I ran into

I came to McGill not knowing anyone, and being a beginner, it was challenging to find a team that would take me in. I managed to find another team of beginners but unfortunately, my team decided to leave the hackathon just after dinner was served on Saturday. As a result I had to do the project all myself: a pretty daunting task! This is my first major hackathon so I was a little bummed out. Still, I followed through because I thought I had an interesting idea. Hopefully the judges agree!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I almost ran into a dead end with the LinkedIn API. Essentially, I wanted to get job information about a user from their profile. However, you needed to register your app with Linkedin and must have an official website (which I did not have) in order to qualify to recieve the access key to use their API. Since I didn't have this, I found a workaround: scrape the page manually with Python, and then exec() a bash script to scrape! Though it may not seem like much, I proud of finding the "way" with my "will".

What I learned

Tech wise, I learned how to use chart.js. It's a really cool way to visualize data with beautiful graphs in the browser. Will definitely be using it again in the future. But what I really learned is that I have a lot left to learn. Everyone at McGill really knows there stuff. Next year, that'll be me.

What's next for Meerar

Hopefully, if the judges like it, we can work on making it a full fledged app available online for student at McGill.

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