International Journal of Scientific Research and Engineering Development

The growing culture of student hackathons has created a pressing need for structured mechanisms that support team assembly and mentorship access. In practice, most participants form teams through informal channels such as personal messaging groups, physical notice boards, or word-of-mouth referrals, resulting in unbalanced compositions and significant time loss. This paper introduces ProjectBuddy, a purpose-built web application that enables engineering students to publish structured technical profiles, discover teammates through skill-based and domain-based search filters, and receive ranked compatibility recommendations generated by a weighted cosine-similarity algorithm. The platform additionally provides a mentor discovery module, a post-collaboration review system, and a community knowledge-sharing section. The technology stack comprises HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap 5, JavaScript, a Node.js/Express backend, a relational SQL database, and Microsoft Azure cloud hosting. A comparative user study involving sixty participants across two institutions demonstrated that platformassisted team formation reduced average assembly time by 74 percent, improved team skill diversity scores by 52.9 percent, and raised post-event team satisfaction from 2.9 to 4.0 out of 5.0. System Usability Scale evaluation returned a score of 79.4, placing the platform in the ‘Good’ usability category.

Manish M Banait, Gaurav V Patil, Om S Patil, Yash A Shete,"ProjectBuddy: Your Hackathon Teammate Matchmaker" International Journal of Scientific Research and Engineering Development, V9(3): Page(98-104) May-June 2026. ISSN: 2581-7175. www.ijsred.com. Published by Scientific and Academic Research Publishing.