BoilerRide

What is BoilerRide?

BoilerRide is a campus-native rideshare web app built exclusively for Purdue students. Drivers post their trips with a location, time, and available seats. Riders search by location and departure window and request a seat in one tap — all within a verified @purdue.edu community.

Inspiration

Every Purdue student knows the feeling: you need to get somewhere, Uber is surging, CityBus doesn't align, and you know three people driving past your building at the same time. We built BoilerRide to solve that coordination problem with zero friction and zero cost.

How we built it

BoilerRide is a single-file HTML/CSS/JS web app — no frameworks, no build step, no server. The entire app lives in one index.html that opens in any browser instantly. State is managed in-memory via window.rides and window.riders arrays. The matching algorithm ranks drivers by time difference (±30 min window) and keyword-based location overlap. The UI supports two roles (driver and rider), a confirmation modal with contact exchange, dark mode, and a seat management system that hides full rides automatically.

Challenges

Keeping the app entirely dependency-free while still feeling polished required careful CSS architecture and creative use of native browser APIs (datalist, time inputs, aria roles). Building a matching algorithm that felt smart without any backend was the core design challenge.

What we learned

Sometimes the best technical decision is the simplest one. A zero-dependency, single-file architecture made the app instantly shareable and deployable — no setup, no barriers. That constraint shaped every design decision for the better.