Inspiration

We decided to build this project because we were deeply unhappy with the duke housing platform. It is incredibly difficult to navigate, and also looks mildly ancient... From our own experiences struggling to navigate the website, we knew we could make it better. We wanted to contribute to making a new platform that could be easily used and liked by all Duke students. We hope that we could send our designs to Duke HRL in the future and discuss new platform ideas. It would be helpful for Duke HRL to fix it platform and better cater to needs of Duke students.

What it does

We built a full-stack application that stores both student and room data, presents organized maps of floors and rooms in Duke dorms, and color-codes rooms based on whether or not they are about to be selected. We have also included a 3D simulation of what each of the rooms looks like, so that users get a preview of it before selecting. Users are also able to see who their roommate is, conveniently select rooms, and review their selections. The interface is new, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to navigate.

How we built it

We built our front-end using React.js and typescript. We created our backend with a REST API in Node.js. All our data tables were built using python with sqlite3.

Challenges we ran into

We had many issues connecting the front-end to the back-end because it was often difficult to scrape all the data in time from the sqlite3 database. We also struggled to lay out all our dorm maps and room status options because we wanted to avoid conflicts with multiple people selecting the same room at once.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Ismael, Emily, and I have never truly built full-stack applications before. We also have not done hackathons before, so this was a great learning experience! I'm glad we got the chance to learn how to use react, apis, and git. We have all not gotten the chance to do software development in a long time.