ChuckTown Neighbors

Request List
Request Submission
User Profile

Inspiration

I live in an apartment complex and recently met one of my neighbors. They had just moved in, but I met them coming home from the hospital on crutches. After helping them in their door, and seeing they were yet to even unpacked, I realized how large a task the person was facing over the next few weeks and was happy to lend a hand.

Yet, without this fortuitous meeting, how would I have found people if I was in the same situtation?

What it does

Users are able to submit requests, currently just to help move groceries. Other users will receive notifications if the request was made within their maximum distance.

How we built it

A Java Spring Boot backend, supported by a PostgreSQL database. The backend API was hosted in AWS using ECS. A React JS front end was built and hosted using S3 and Cloudfront.

A number of third party tools were also used for their functionality:

Google API to pull the lat/long of addresses
Auth0 for authentication and authorization
AWS SES for email templates

Challenges we ran into

Implementing a good chat library that would hide user details until they both approved the connection was a more time consuming development than initially forecasted.