Posted on Sep 1

Matching Technonauts! Networking App with Nylas

#devchallenge #nylaschallenge #api #ai

This is a submission for the Nylas Challenge: AI Expedition & Galaxy Brain

Team Members:

Violeta

Technologies

Nylas API
Chat GPT
Firebase
Emotion
Material UI
Next.JS
Node.JS
WebSockets
Accessibility
Vercel
Glitch.IO

Try it out here:
User
Admin
Note: For the admin you can use these credentials:

violetadevnylashackathon@gmail.com
123456

What I Built and Why

I built a Random Meeting Matcher tool, designed to facilitate spontaneous connections between remote team members.

In a traditional office setting, casual conversations—like those over coffee—help foster relationships and build camaraderie. However, in a remote work environment, these serendipitous moments are much harder to come by. This tool aims to bridge that gap by allowing an admin to create scheduled "dates" where team members can queue up and get randomly matched with a colleague for a quick virtual meeting. The motivation behind this project stems from my experience working in a remote company, where I noticed the lack of informal interactions that typically happen in an office setting.

This tool provides an easy and automated way to recreate those coffee chat moments virtually, helping to maintain the social fabric of the team.

Of course, this could be use in any other context where you want to randomly match two people! This is just a specific use case of the tool I have built.

Demo

Code

You can review the full codebase on GitHub:
App & Back Office
Websockets Server

The project is open-source and licensed under the MIT License, ensuring that others can freely use and adapt the tool for their own remote teams.

Your Journey

I leveraged Nylas' API to handle the creation of calendar events, sign up participants as contacts, and create meeting links, which was crucial for automating the process of setting up virtual meetings. Through this project, I deepened my understanding of integrating third-party APIs into a full-stack application with NextJS and Websockets (I usually focus more in the Frontend part!), particularly in managing user authentication, calendar integrations, and real-time WebSocket connections.
I'm particularly proud of how seamless the user experience turned out, from queueing up to being matched and receiving an invite—all without requiring any manual intervention from the admin. This project not only solved a real problem I've experienced but also provided an opportunity to explore and utilize the powerful capabilities of the Nylas platform.