Red Paperclip

Quid pro quo

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Inspiration

While participating in this Hackathon, we both wanted to create something that would be meaningful and useful to the community. We came to the quick conclusion that college students do not have any money, and that there was a much better way for them to get the things things need without having to use what they do not have. The goal of Red Paperclip is to allow users to trade with others nearby for things they want or need. For example, this could be extremely useful for college textbooks, saving hundreds of dollars by allowing users to trade their past ones with others in exchange for ones they need. In terms of students here at RIT, one of the popular forms of currencies for underclassman is Gracies' meal swipes. Using this app, they could be able to trade those meals for things they need such as supplies, help with homework, etc. The name of this app was inspired by Kyle MacDonald, a Canadian blogger who is famous for trading one red paperclip up to a house through a number of steps.

Our Process

For this project, we decided that the best technology to use would be a web framework, because it makes whatever web app we make accessible on all devices. From there, we decided that our best option was to use React, a popular front-end framework for JavaScript. But we actually decided to not use JavaScript, instead, we used TypeScript. TypeScript is an expansion of JavaScript which allows for more complex things such as type casting, object oriented programming, and easier function shortcuts. Both of us did not have much experience with the language and it was definitely challenging to get used to the syntax. But in the end, we are glad we used it because it prevented so many errors we would have not have caught if we used just plain JavaScript. For other technologies, we used Firebase Authentication for the login, Ubuntu running apache2 for the web server, PHP for the server side language, and SQL for database.

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