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home page
Inspiration
All of our team members have to take the airplane to get home over breaks, so we all recognize the cumbersome task of posting on Snapchat and hoping that someone also has a flight around the same time as you so you can Uber together to LAX/back (fares are incredibly high). Thus, we set out to make a platform that unified the ridesharing for not only USC students but also students from any school that may want to coordinate cab rides to the airport with other students from their school.
What it does
Bon-Bon Voyage allows university students to create accounts with their school emails. Then, they can search for pre-existing cab rides posted by other users that they can join in order to get to their airport based on their flight information. On the home page, they can manage their rides that they've joined and the pending rides they've created. On the Booking page, they can search for more rides they might want to join. If no results match their search, they can create a new booking that other users can join. On the Message page, they can message with other users that they plan to take a cab with to coordinate meetup locations, times, etc. On the Donations page, they can donate to wonderful organizations that support women in STEM (such as AthenaHacks ;)). On the Contact and Report pages, they can submit forms to contact us and report another user, respectively. On the Community Guidelines page, they can view the rules that we put down for using our platform.
How we built it
We created Bon-Bon Voyage collaboratively using GitHub, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We also connected it to a Firebase database, which we also all collaborated on. The database was configured to store matches, rides, and users (so far).
Challenges we ran into
We had a lot of trouble initially implementing a database into our website using Firebase, as none of us have used cloud databases with HTML before. We also had to do a lot of trial and error when implementing functionalities such as search and add booking and link them together with other parts of our website.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of ourselves for being able to create so much of the functionality we originally had in mind, especially because we all tended to overscope in the brainstorming phase. For example, we have pop-ups, a working booking page that is linked to a cloud database, a chat system, and more. We were able to learn so much JavaScript in one night, and we were able to hone our CSS (especially with theming the website to desserts) and HTML skills as well.
What we learned
We learned a LOT about Firestore and JavaScript throughout the process of making Bon-Bon Voyage. The syntax for accessing elements from the database is a little awkward, so it took some time, but we got it up and working! We also learned the importance of partitioning different pages of a website into different folders, especially with a project as complex as this; while there is some unifying code, a lot of it is specific to each of our unique pages and their intended uses.
What's next for Bon-Bon Voyage
We definitely want to continue to beautify the website with more sweet treats, and we want to link everything together fully so that users can see real-time updates to their homepage and messages when they add new bookings. We also had the idea in the beginning of having the option for women to opt for women-only rides, which proved hard to implement because we focused more on the database functionality rather than the login functionality, so once we finish implementing the login authentication with the database, we can also add that. We also wanted to add an AI chatbot to notify users when they have a new match or when someone requests to join their ride.
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