Boiler Match

Inspiration

All of us had to go through the grueling process of finding and talking to roommates over various social media apps, losing track of who we reached out too, and having to discuss preferences with everyone. We wanted that process to be much easier and organized for future Boilermakers, so we decided to make a playful website to host all the roommate finding and matching in one.

What it does

Our website allows users to create profiles with their living preferences along with bios about themselves. They can then view other user's profiles, and swipe left if they are interested, and right if they would like to explore other options. If they swipe left, the profile is added to their matches, and it opens up a chat with the user, where they can discuss in more detail. This makes the process organized and stress-free.

How we built it

Our tech stack for this project was backend in Express and Node.js, while our frontend was implemented with Vite and React, allowing us to utilize interactivity and the UI was done with Tailwind.

Challenges we ran into

While using Tailwind, we ran into an issue when installing when the Tailwind properties would not apply to the elements. We struggled on this for awhile, but after reimplementing Vite and Tailwind from scratch in a more organized manner, we were able to resolve the issue. This was also our first time building a full stack project, so it was a steep learning curve, but after hours of hard work, we managed to push out a developed project that we are proud of.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that for our first hackathon and full stack project, we were able to accomplish this much as it was difficult and we were often unmotivated. We were able to be resilient and work together, makign this an incredible learning and bonding experience. We are proud that we learned to be more comfortable with Node.js and Tailwind, and we are also proud to know we improved our problem solving skills.

What we learned

We learned how to divide up the task and work together to get it done. We also learned how to troubleshoot effectively as the project went on, and we learned that we must do things in a methodical manner to avoid mistakes during set up, ad they can set us back.

What's next for Boiler Match

Regarding updates for Boiler Match, we hope to add some more elements to it such as integrating Purdue's two factor authentication to ensure that only Purdue students can access the website. We also would like to try deploying it on a domain so that we can reach the future Boilermakers and provide them with a tool to make their life easier.

Built With

• express.js
• github
• mongodb
• node.js
• react
• tailwind
• vite