Alloy

Demo

About

The problem it solves Hackathons are broken. After some discussion with different hackathon organizers it was incredible to hear how many projects submitted end up in the Hackathon Graveyard. One of the reasons behind this is simply due to poor project submissions. This is not great for the sponsors as they are putting up capital and bounties in the hope for projects that continue to bring attention to their technology. Going back another step. The most important factor of a winning hackathon project is the team. The current team formation strategies are inefficient, and clearly not effective. The traditional approach and what unfolded here at ETHDenver was the following: People started to flood into the Discord and Telegram channels that they were looking for a team. From the look of the conversations held this did not seem to have a high success rate due to blocked DMs, lack of profile information and no structure or strategy. Then there was an in-person team formation event, however many people missed it and also it did not give time to vet individuals strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, last minute there were whiteboards and a spreadsheet on a TV in the Buidl Hub with a list of people looking for teams and what their skills were. This cluster led to a large portion of suboptimal teams formed. Alloy transforms hackathon team formation with a "Tinder-like" interface, enabling users to swipe through profiles to find teammates based on skills, work, and interests, ensuring better matches and complementary skills. It promotes early teaming and project incubation for well-developed ideas from the start, making team formation efficient and improving project sustainability. Essentially, Alloy streamlines team building based on skills, addressing project success and compatibility, helping participants realize innovative projects effectively.

How it's made

Challenges we ran into We decided to create a mobile app which integrated Particle Network's authentication library for React Native. Unfortunatley we ran into issues implementing the library. The Particle Network documentation was sparse on details on how to integrate the product. React Native applications for iOS require developers to understand three seperate frameworks/applications; React-Native, Expo, and XCode. All three of these environments require specialized implementation knowledge. The Particle Network documentation shows which configuration settings are required but fail to mention which framework or application is involved in the specific configurations. I attempted to find a Particle Network DevRel but none had checked in with the Mentors at the BUIDLHub. Since we didn't have access to that resource, our team found the Particle Discord and Telegram channels. Unfortunately we didn't receive any assistance from their team, so we were unable to correctly build the application in Expo. The lack of support and documentation were difficult to work with, and by the time the team was able to pivot from mobile app development, it was too late.