[P][HackNaróg] - Forseti

Inspiration

We asked ourselves a question - what is the "new reality"? For us the answers were:

we live in a filter bubble wanting to talk only with people with the same opinions
pandemic really limited the possibility to exchange ideas
we started to travel again across the world and want to talk with locals
diversity became an important topic and new standards are needed

Forseti (the name of the app) comes from Norse mythology (as well as the font used in the app) and it's the name of the god of justice and peace and reconciliation.

What it does

As a response to the points from previous section our app lets people to find other ones interested in similar topics with different or the same level of domain knowledge and exchange ideas through a meeting. Moreover it suggests questions and readings to make conversation more fluent and natural. We don't ask about gender, age, religion, nationality and your beliefs, we just want you to reach people from all around the world and exchange ideas.

Tenets:

make people more open
promote diversity
expand our knowledge
broaden your horizons

so in 4 words: Go beyond your reality!

Usage is so simple:

Create a request about what you want to talk
Wait for a person matching your request
Write an email, discuss and meet!

Stay safe! Our app prevents from receiving hostile message with the use of AI (hostile requests are blocked) and users rating system.

How we built it

Leveraging knowledge from many widely-known, big IT companies, state-of-the-art technologies, endless discussions and what's most important - teamwork and pair programming

Challenges we ran into

frontend development when you you didn't touch it for a while
granular permissions of Azure B2C
B2C is easy for ASP .NET - we wanted to make it for Spring

Accomplishments that we're proud of

we would really see it as real-life solution
monetization idea (sponsored suggested places to meet, sponsored topics to discuss, premium account - allows for having more than 5 meetings in a month and 5 concurrent requests)
probably the only app in the hackaton that has fully operating users management system (Azure B2C)
app is fully deployed (continuous delivery!): https://forsetihacknarog.azurewebsites.net. We are not afraid - feel free to try it out. Create a user and meet!
it looks well, having in mind that was designed by 4 typical programmers

What we learned

In our field of study continuous development is of significant importance, this weekend the points are:

Azure B2C is pretty powerful, has really granular permissions and it's painful to forget about even one
rediscovered how to center a button in html (sentiment analysis was easier)
despite each of us works in a different technology daily we realized that Java is the one that everyone knows quite well
wide range of ML services provided by the clouds
4 typical backend programmers (in flannel shirts) can create not so bad UI

What's next for Forseti

wide database of materials, reading, experts, questions, topics
tests if you are really a domain expert
security and verification of users

Tech Stack

Because of awesomeness of cloud computing we decided to heavily leverage Azure cloud services: business-2-customers (B2C), sentiment analysis, database, deployment. Because of the limited time we used widely known Spring backend and Angular frontend, with which everyone was a bit familiar. But despite a short time we didn't abandoned software engineering basics like CI/CD. Architecture is pretty easy - a single frontend and a scalable backend.