Background
While at Northwestern, a group of students including myself discovered a problem: we often heard about student group events we would have liked to attend, but usually only after the event had occured. At Northwestern, student groups primarily advertise events through flyers taped to the ground, which don't get much visibility and create environmental problems.
Thus, Pvmnt 2.0 was born. We set out to create an online hub for campus events, to allow students to get the most out of their college experience and reduce the impractical practice of taping flyers to the ground. In addition to what you'd expect from such a platform, the key highlights are being able to subscribe to student groups, and a graph traversal algorithm that recommends events based on similarity to other users' interests. The recommendation system was based on the idea that if two people have a history of similar interests, they will both be interested in similar events going forward.
The App
Cypher
The core of the application (except users and authentication) made use of a graph based database queried in Cypher "GraphQL," a language that allows for powerful, expressive graph queries. At the end of the day, it's still a relational database that is functionally the same as any SQL database, but it makes it easier to visualize and explore what is going on.