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Bugreport

The first morning moving into a new apartment, I’d been hit with the realization that I was sharing my room with unwanted strangers. I’d forgotten to ask my landlord prior to moving in if there were bugs in the apartment, and I got my answer when I woke up in the morning having received countless unwanted welcoming gifts in the form of bite marks on myself. Realizing the only website that provided a means to report infestations was 20 years old and barely maintained, I decided to take charge and stop others from being in the same egregious situation. - Nicholas

The project allows potential renters to access reports by other anonymous users on bug infections in their apartment. Users may search by address, and a map view will be displayed on nearby locations with all apartments that have reports of bug infections, the type, as well as the severity. It was built using a combination of Java, Sprint Boot, and Postgres hosted on RDS for the backend, and React for the frontend. Early on during the development of the website, we ran into the question of - how do we stop fake user reviews? The obvious solution against bots would be to use email authentication during user sign-in, but since the website was meant to be community driven, anonymous, and readily available it didn’t align with our vision to require mandatory registration.

Digging through the legality of renting out an apartment with a known infestation, we learned that upon being asked, landlords must respond truthfully to questions about bugs. This was our answer to the question then. There was no need to moderate the reviews ourselves. Instead we could have the community decide on the legitimacy of reviews through a large sum of reports. There’s no way to completely filter out all ingenuine reviews, so if there is suspicion that there are bugs, then the go-to answer would be asking the landlord directly. The website should simply serve as a guideline, and a reminder for potential renters to do so.

One big challenge that we faced was in coordinating the use of a bunch of frameworks, a bunch of APIs, and a bunch of libraries together. There were incompatibilities left and right, and a great portion of our time was spent on resolving unhelpful error codes. Next time, even though coding itself is more enjoyable, more focus should have been put into planning out all the details of the projects in the future, so the coding process is much more smooth. In the future, we would like to add much more customization to Bugreport, including a peer review system, and a system to filter by severity.

Built With

• amazon-rds-relational-database-service
• and-postgres-hosted-on-rds-for-the-backend
• java
• postgresql
• react
• sprint-boot