ApartMate

The ease ability of modern dating apps, but now for tedious tasks like apartment hunting! Apartment hunting can be tough, but with ApartMate it is as easy as hopping on your favorite dating app.

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Inspiration

At first, we all had no idea what to build, but as we started conversating, we discovered that one of our teammates had a not-so-great experience finding apartment. He struggled with finding apartments that were within his budget range and near his university. So as we brainstormed, we figured, dating is extremely easy now-a-days with the aid of technology, why can't we do that for apartment hunting?

What it does

ApartMate uses an apartment API to show you apartment recommendations based on your location preference and how far you would like to be from it.

How we built it

We have three main structures for this website, Frontend, Backend, and the API Function. Our backend is built with Google Cloud services and Firebase. We use GCS to store all our code and host it on a live server. Our API function is a python file that calls to the Apify API which then calls to the appartment.com API and stores our data in FireBase. The frontend framework is built with React. We used Google Auth to log in users and connect their profile to FireBase and save their preferred apartment's.

Challenges we ran into

None of us have ever used Google Cloud Platform so having to learn how to navigate through it was tough but not impossible. When searching for different API's to use many of them were broken or we would've needed to pay for them. We were able to find Apify API that scrapes data from LIVE searches that we send to it. The data comes from apartments.com. Only one of our team members is proficient in React, so we all depended on him for our UI to come out correctly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having the strength to push through our first hackathon. Being able to find a working API. Connecting our application to GCP and hosting it on a live server. Creating the UI with React and having it function correctly.

What we learned

GCP is great for hosting websites. Linking firebase to front end was easy. There are thousands of API's available to use, one has to work.

What's next for ApartMate

We would love to implement different portions that allows you to swipe on hotels, houses, restaurants and many more things to ease the process of choosing your next destination.

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