Paired is a tool to facilitate one-off peer mentoring and tutoring sessions between students earlier in the Turing program and later. By integrating Slack and email for notifications and Google Calendar for coordinating times and synchronizing with Turing innings we can vastly improve on the current functionality of Paired, making it easier to use for both people.
The current implementation of Paired does not notify the upper mod student in any way when a lower mod student has booked a session with them; this requires an under-communicated step of the lower-mod student reaching out on Slack to notify the upper mod student that turns people away from using it. It does not allow upper mod students to modify or cancel sessions once a lower mod student has booked one. It quickly becomes out of sync with the student's actually availability. And it requires each student to manually update which mod they are in without any notification to do so.
Additionally, the current Paired app is built completely in front-end frameworks, which makes it challenging for back-end students to contribute to its ongoing development.
- Build a distinct Rails version of Paired for the purpose of this project with disticnt interface and back-end components so that, in the long run, the Rails backend can become the new backend for the Paired app. OR Work directly on the existing repos to refactor Paired.
- Integrate with Slack so that upper-mod students are automatically notified when sessions are booked.
- Integrate with Google Calendar so that students can create custom session availability times on their calendars which are synchronized with their availability in Paired.
- Current and future Turing students seeking help
- Current and future Turing students seeking to give help
- Current and future Back-end Turing students seeking to contribute to Paired
- Slack integration
- Google Calendar integration
- Support for creating and tracking "rock-and-pebble" relationships
- Fuller CRUD control over sessions
- Better and more informative notifications
- Automated profile updates
- Synchronization with Turing calendar for automatic changes to User profiles or, at minimum, email or Slack notifications to update at the right times
- Back-end friendly entry point to Paired development
- Stats about hours spent mentoring and possibly report generation so that pairing can be part of alumni portfolios
- Which APIs will you use?
- Slack (https://api.slack.com/).
- Google Calendar (https://developers.google.com/calendar).
- Which OAuth integration are you planning to use?
- Slack (https://api.slack.com/authentication/oauth-v2).
- Google Calendar (https://developers.google.com/calendar/caldav/v2/guide).