The problem SkillSwap solves

SkillSwap solves the challenge of students struggling to find peers who can help them with specific skills or subjects. By connecting students who want to learn with others who can teach, SkillSwap fosters collaborative learning, allowing users to schedule real-time skill-sharing sessions. This not only enhances learning but also builds a network of like-minded peers.

Use cases:

A student can learn Python from a peer and in exchange, help them with web development.
Facilitates better study groups or collaborations during hackathons, group projects, and exams.

Challenges we ran into

Backend API Optimization:
One of the key challenges was ensuring that the backend API could handle multiple requests simultaneously, especially during peak times when many users were looking for skill matches or scheduling sessions. We faced issues with performance bottlenecks, but overcame this by implementing our MongoDB queries to reduce latency.

Clerk Authentication Integration:
During the integration of Clerk for user authentication, we ran into issues with session persistence. Some users were getting logged out unexpectedly due to session token expiration. We resolved this by using JWT (JSON Web Tokens) along with Clerk’s session management to keep users signed in longer, while also ensuring secure access to protected routes. Another challenge was managing role-based access control (for students who are teaching vs. those who are learning), which was fixed by customizing Clerk's middleware to handle user roles dynamically.