Scotty Sales

Team name: MASSive ScAMS Members: Abigail Li abigail2 Michelle Li mli6 Sophie Liu sophiel2 Stephanie Guan sguan2

Inspiration

At the end of a semester, students often find themselves with leftover meal blocks or unwanted household appliances and furniture. Although students can try to give away their meal blocks to friends or sell their items on Facebook Marketplace, these methods are often ineffective and troublesome. Consequently, meal blocks are wasted and perfectly good furniture is thrown out.

We hope to motivate students to minimize waste with Scotty Sales, a website exclusively for CMU students that would provide a safe, convenient, and organized way to buy and sell items with each other. Such a website not only lists furniture that is closer to students but also offers more trustworthy transactions between fellow alumni.

What it does

CMU students can log in and view, post, and claim from listings on the site. Listings can be anything, including but not limited to furniture, appliances, cleaning supplies, and unused meal blocks.

How we built it

We used React for the frontend and react-router-dom for the backend. At the moment, data is stored locally and persists between refreshes of the site.

Challenges we ran into

We had numerous difficulties with the syntax and implementation of React, and our lack of experience with this framework complicated the process of wiring the frontend to the backend. To combat this, we spent hours learning from React tutorials to set up our website and item purchases. One major roadblock was figuring out how to store item information locally on the backend and displaying the information in our marketplace listings. Since data would refresh across separate visits of the webpage, we turned towards multiple online tutorials and mentors for help.

We found the aid of mentors to be extremely useful in the debugging process of linking pages with others. Special thanks to Chittesh, who guided us through placing print statements in our code to garner more information about where we went wrong, and Jonathan, who greatly helped us with brainstorming by providing very accurate and relevant critiques of our ideas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a working site in the span of 24 hours with very limited web development experience, learned how to do full-stack development, and integrated many frontend changes from HTML to React. We're also proud of how we successfully implemented a system where users can upload a photo from the file system and save the photo on the website despite the fact that JSON files cannot store images. We are proud of the fact that we were able to finish our project despite the many Github issues surrounding merging and pulling.

What we learned

How to quickly learn a new language and framework, how to store data locally using the backend, and how to use GitHub effectively.

What's next for CMU Marketplace

Future improvements include creating a secure login using ScottyLab's Login API and enabling notifications when a person’s listing has a purchase request. There are also a lot of user interface improvements we could add, such as having a more organized display format for item listings.