BusBuddies

Home Page
Registration
Profile Setup
Matches
Chats

Inspiration

Commuting from UBC can be an isolating experience. Many students travel long distances alone, especially in the evenings, which can feel both unsafe and monotonous. BusBuddies aims to transform these routine trips into meaningful social experiences by connecting students who share routes and schedules.

What it does

BusBuddies is a web application designed to help UBC students find companions for their bus commute home by matching users based on their bus route and desired departure time. Simply sign up with your UBC student email address, enter your commute info, and get matched with potential BusBuddies!

How we built it

We used Next.js and React with Supabase to store and retrieve user profiles. Our devs started on the backend for creating and updating user profiles while our UI/UX designer prototyped the design on Figma. After this, we moved on to implementing our home page to display user matches, as well as a chat page.

Challenges we ran into

One of our primary challenges was managing time constraints. To ensure we delivered a functional minimum viable product, we continuously adapted our goals and refined our focus. For example, a few hours into the hacking period, we needed to change our frontend styling from CSS to Tailwind to better suit the Next.js structure. This iterative approach allowed us to maintain's the app's core purpose while remaining conscious of our constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're most proud of our ability to integrate the frontend and backend into a seamless product—including a matching system we developed from scratch. Additionally, from a UI perspective, we're proud of how well we were able to match our original prototype in such a short amount of time.

What we learned

We all learned a lot about user authentication through Supabase session management. We also all developed our skills in version control (resolving merge conflicts!) and Tailwind CSS.