Team 25-50presentSkillMatch
SkillMatch Demo Video
A learned skill is a skill for life
As a group, we were looking to create an app that would be useful and enriching for people, and we thought that allowing folks to connect for the sole purpose of learning would be a great opportunity to deepen the sense of belonging to a community and allow users to establish meaningful and friendly relationships. This way, the SkillMatch idea was born.
SkillMatch is a web-based app that provides a platform for connecting people who are looking to do skill exchanges. With SkillMatch, you can create a personalised profile, list the interests you want to explore, and showcase the skills you're ready to teach. Our search tool helps you find the perfect match for a skill exchange.
The app also offers the possibility to connect with people based on the skills you want to learn; in this sense, SkillMatch is also a good choice for people who are not particularly interested in the exchange, but in a learning experience with another person (who may ask for a lesson fee!). In any case, you can easily discuss and arrange exchanges or learning sessions with our live chat feature.
Through both the Exchange list and Learning list you will be able to access other user's profiles to know more about them and to review them if you have meet before.
The Team
Sara Matos
Jack Brown
Dorota Szubert
Muhammad Sallu
Fabian Fernandez
Technologies
We used: Socket.IO for live chat functionality, Railway.app to host the Socket.IO server, Supabase as BAAS, Netlify to host the front-end.
Socket.IO was the most powerful and most trusted technology that we found to implement a live chat functionality. We decided to use Supabase because we needed to build a reliable and relatively easy-to-use backend in a very short period of time. Also, we thought that the authentication functionality it provided was going to be very useful for our purposes - and it was! In terms of hosting, we have our socket.IO server running on Railway.app and the front-end on Netlify. We chose these two hosting services because they are very easy to work with and also very easy to maintain.
Challenges Faced
The most challenging section of this project was finding the right technology for the live chat and knowing how to do its initial set up. Then, learning how to correctly use Supabase to our advantage was a steep learning curve, especially when it came to authentication and creating/using custom functions to programmatically interact with the database.