The problem College Link solves

Many a times, students with skills fail to win at an event because of lack of a perfect team. Other times, they might not get to know about that event, since there are so many going on simulatenously these days! Well, worry not! This application is aimed at solving all problems related with exposure and create a perfect social environment for your college. Presenting - College Link. Consider a hackathon you came to know about recently. You get a great idea but need people with Machine Learning and IOT skills to implement it. You go round and round asking your friends at college if they have those skills, but unfortunately, you didn't find any such friend. There's no social channel for listing a demand as "Team needed for upcoming hackathon with these skills". You give up and look forward to the next hackathon. Well, this won't be the case if you use this app! Using this app, you can post regarding any upcoming event/hackathon/contest, choose the required skills and connect to students from your college who have those skills! Every student having the skill(s) you mentioned in your post, will receive a notification regarding your post. They can then comment on your post or start a chat with you via this app itself! You'll also receive notifications about posts posted by other users as per your skillset. With increasing number of users, the chances of creating a perfect team will increase. Moreover, you'll stay updated with events around the globe as posted by your fellow college-mates! The problem of lack of compatible team members or being un-informed about a certain event, is no more!

Challenges we ran into

We'd be lying if we say that the entire project wasn't a challenge in itself. The entire process from formulating the idea to the final render of the app, was a challenge. But with constant effort and teamwork, we made it work. Here's a summary of the main challenges we faced :

• Enabling chat functionality between any two users, both via the users tab and from any post in the current user's feed. We had a hard time figuring out how to manipulate the database, store and retrieve messages and display them accordingly. It took us some time and many debugs, but we did it.

• Enabling notifications functionality. We needed to figure out a way to send notifications to any user about a post which corresponded to the same skill(s) they had. After many changes in the database, we did it.

• Working with Model and Adapter classes. The functions to retrieve data from the database and store data into the database got really complicated at times. We tested out many methods to finally formulate the perfect ones.