After working on it for the entire 2020–2021 school year, we are excited to bring you Match!
Match is a multipurpose application that allows organizations to match its members based on specified criteria. This matching functionality is especially useful for organizations whose services differ between members.
We worked with three clients this year:
Hives for Heroes: a non-profit organization led by Steve Jimenez whose mission is to match veterans with mentors at beehive centers nationwide and combat veteran suicide across the world (Napier Launch Challenge finalists!)
Houston Covidsitters: a non-profit organization initiated by Brittany Nguyen and Harvey Zhou that matches student volunteers with healthcare workers to assist them with childcare & tutoring services during the pandemic
Rice Center for Career Development: Rice University’s career advising office that matches students looking for externship opportunities to companies willing to host them
“Our experience working with Rice Apps was extremely positive. From the kick off meeting through implementation, team members were thoughtful, curious, professional, and highly responsive to communication. Ultimately, Rice Apps created a matching tool to our preferred workflow specs, that outperforms our manual time intensive process, that we will use in perpetuity, saving hours of time and worry on our end.”
— Michelle Passo, Rice CCD
“Hives for Heroes had the pleasure of working with RiceApps in developing a web based matching tool to match a mentor effectively and efficiently to a military veteran NewBee based on geographical location throughout the United States. Over this period, RiceApps was able to interpret our intent and provide a functional and actionable solution, alleviating hours of manual data manipulation, with a single click. We are proud to have such amazing students contributing to the mission of Hives for Heroes to save bees and save vets!”
— Steve Jimenez, Hives for Heroes Founder
Our team began developing Match in Summer 2020 with a popular JavaScript library, React. The basic Match platform contained two columns that each listed a group of people to be matched in addition to a side menu with a customizable sorts/filters tab. While improving this initial prototype, our biggest challenge was creating versions of our platform that served all three clients’ needs; this included finding the right features to prioritize and working with different deadlines. We met with our clients several times during the semester to clarify what the most important features were. Additionally, we demoed our initial product early, so our clients could let us know which features to change. In this way, we were able to successfully meet all three of our clients’ needs.
Check out our work below (and also email us if you think your organization could benefit from a matching service)!
Here’s our wonderful team that’s built Match from the ground up:
- Technical Lead: Adam Zawierucha
- Technical Lead: Ryan Knightly
- PM: Anna Bai
- PM: Sanjanaa Shanmugam
- Alexis Nicholas
- Manaal Khan
- Benny Utama
- Yanyu Zhong
- Peter Wang
About RiceApps
RiceApps is a team of Rice students who build software solutions that empower students and community partners. With an emphasis on both the product and the process — RiceApp developers learn and apply new technologies to custom-tailored products that directly impact client organizations.
