CartPool

Inspiration

One of our friends saw a bulk deal for protein powder and knew they wouldn't need all of it, so they split the bill with a couple of his friends to save some money and wastage by distributing excess. What if anyone could do that with strangers in their local area?

What it does

It creates collective shopping carts (aka. pools) where people connect with each other to be able to pool money together to buy bulk deals, where they will then set their own agreed upon location to distribute the bulk buy.

How we built it

Backend:

• Node.js
• Express5 (typescript)
• In-memory and JSON file persistence (local data store)
• BCrypt (for password hashing)
• date-fns (for dates)
• Cors (for API access)

Frontend:

• React
• Typescript
• TSX (for running server and dev)
• Vite (for build/dev server)
• MapLibre GL JS (for map rendering and interactive elements)
• CSS

Challenges we ran into

• Weak on frontend engineers, so workload was often bottlenecked and unbalanced
• Scope and purpose of the app -> how would it best fit the prompt

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Map
• Clean UI
• Request system
• Polling

What we learned

• Making useful solutions and considering functionality of the app vs the complexity of the functions of the app

What's next?

Hopefully, we will be able to do more hackathons effectively as we gain more experience (mainly in frontend)!

Built With

• bcrypt
• cors
• css
• express.js
• json
• maplibre
• node.js
• react
• ts
• vite