Project Buddy: Find your Project Partner

Abstract

The quest for that perfect partner from another college/state/country is becoming ever more important in today\'s world. As calls for proposals are launched every day by various students and working professionals, ideas are being hatched all over the world. It may be instinctive to look around a familiar circle or rely on contacts or networks close to hand to find what is needed to bring a project idea to life. But what if this does not yield the desired result? Here Project Buddy comes into the picture. It is a tool that allows students and working professionals with a project idea to register online on a dedicated section of the website. Once registered to a specific theme or tech stack, project ideas can be posted and a request for ideal partners placed. Best of all, it\'s completely free to sign up for an account and get started.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

Currently, Students face a lot of issues while searching for a team to work on a project. It's a tedious task to find people with similar tech stacks and interests to solve a problem. Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, and GitHub may prove to be helpful but most of the time they do not yield desired results. There is no centralized platform where students can connect with like-minded individuals and collaborate with each other. As a result, people mostly try to work solely on their projects or may end up with a makeshift team that doesn’t have the required skills to execute their ideas properly. This doesn’t come across as a problem at first, but as the projects move toward their final stages, new complexities and bugs start to show up every day, and the lack of experience and proper knowledge becomes evident. This often ends up causing various problems such as:

A. Conflict and Tension

Conflict or a difference of opinion can be healthy and, if carefully managed, can trigger useful debates. It can make people think differently, expanding knowledge and insight; innovation can happen and results flourish. Different opinions are not a bad thing. It’s how we handle the conflict that makes a difference.

B. Low Engagement

Team engagement is crucial to success. If engaged, team members on a given project will be interested in what they do, committed to the project mission, and willing to go the extra mile. They are there in the body as well as mentally and emotionally. The key to engagement is involvement – by involving others you make it impossible to stay detached.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

We read several journals and papers along with analysis of several surveys from which we found out about several things such as:-

1. Various tech stacks used for building scalable products
2. Most popular frameworks/technologies people work on
3. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn.

After studying all this we were able to conclude several points such as:-

a. Students find it very hard to find partners for projects

b. Existing alternatives are not suitable for the hunt for project partners

c. There is no centralized platform for students and working professionals to collaborate on a project

d. There is a lack of good developers working to solve real-life problems.

III. METHODOLOGY

The list of technologies and frameworks used in this project is as follows:

A. Wireframing

1. Figma: Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design. Figma prototype allows you to create interactive flows that explore how a user may interact with your designs. Prototypes are an excellent way to preview interactions and user flows and shares and iterate on ideas. Figma was built for the future of the web.

B. Frontend

1. React.js: Free and open-source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces based on UI components. React is an efficient, flexible, and open-source JavaScript framework library that allows developers to the creation of simple, fast, and scalable web applications.
2. Next.js: Next.js is used for server-side rendering and routing of web pages. Next.js is a flexible React framework that gives you building blocks to create fast web applications.
3. Tailwind CSS: Tailwind CSS works by scanning all of your HTML files, JavaScript components, and any other templates for class names, generating the corresponding styles, and then writing them to a static CSS file. It's fast, flexible, and reliable — with zero runtime.

C. Backend

1. Node.js: Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. It allows developers to run JavaScript on the server side, enabling them to write server-side applications with JavaScript. Node.js provides an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.
2. Express.js: Express.js is a popular open-source web application framework for Node.js that provides a robust set of features for building web applications and APIs. It provides a lightweight and flexible structure for building web applications and APIs, making it easier to write server-side code in Node.js.
3. MongoDB: MongoDB is a popular open-source NoSQL database system that is designed to store and manage large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. It is a document-oriented database that stores data in flexible, JSON-like documents, instead of using tables and rows like traditional relational databases. MongoDB provides a rich set of features that make it an attractive choice for developers, including dynamic schema design, easy scalability, automatic sharding, powerful querying and indexing capabilities, and support for geospatial data and full-text search.

Conclusion

After completion of the project, one can connect with the people working on the same tech stack and can share ideas regarding any technological advancements that they can bring. People will be able to make their accounts and network with people of similar expertise and interest. Once registered to a specific theme or tech stack, project ideas can be posted and a request for ideal partners placed. Best of all, it\'s completely free to sign up for an account and get started.

References

[1] Michael Burke, Carie L. Page, January 2008. Research on easily accessible and user-friendly collaboration tools allows students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn. [2] Dietrich, P., Eskerod, P., Dalcher, D., & Sandhawalia, B. (2010). The role of project collaboration quality and knowledge: integration capability in multi-partner projects. Paper presented at PMI® Research Conference: Defining the Future of Project Management, Washington, DC. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute. [3] N. Schoenherr, Discovering why study groups are more effective,2006. Retrieved from https://source.wustl.edu/2006/07/discovering-why-study-groupsare-moreeffective

Copyright

Copyright © 2023 Sparsh Malhotra, Siddarth Singh, Lavy Sharma, Agrima Sawhney, Mrs. Kirti Kushwah. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.