Cicada (Senior Design)

In 2016 as part of my Senior Design project, I was part of a 4 man team that developed Canopy. While many organizations currently use a combination of various email threads and a number of different group chats, why not have them all in one place? Why not create an app with two different communication options, a forum and a chat? Thus, Canopy was born.

In 2021, Slack has threads which represent a very similar construct, but to be used in a slightly different way. Even 5 years on from this project, I still think this is a concept not fully fleshed out by commercial chat apps even though I don’t think we had the right implementation either!

Organization Directory & UI Customization!

Project Details

What is the site built in?

The backend was implemented in Node.js using the Express framework and a MongoDB datastore. We developed our real-time chat functionality on top of socket.io. The iOS app was developed using the Swift language.

Product Roadmap

While this was just a one semester Senior Design class, there are a number of logical improvements that were discussed and even architected for. Tags would have represented a form of Access Control (similar to the Discord role system), while a potential customizable Dashboard would enable people to focus on the most important conversations occuring within an organization.

What did you do?

While my teammates handled the development of the iOS app, I worked on the development of backend services as well as helped design and test the iOS app. Out of the many ideas that the team discussed, this one was one I had suggested so I helped flesh out the initial idea into an achievable product in the course of just one semester.