CT63-JJADO-HomeSurf

HomeSurf: Safe Shelter. Right Now. From Your Community.

Comment

Inspiration

HomeSurf was founded because traditional emergency housing is often too slow and rigid to meet sudden, short-term needs for shelter. We realized that critical gaps in the safety force vulnerable individuals into uncertain situations when institutional resources are unavailable.

What it does

HomeSurf is a peer-to-peer connection platform that provides immediate, short-term relief by utilizing the spare capacity within a city. It serves two core user groups:

Hosts: Citizens who can securely list spare rooms or available space. Guests: Individuals facing sudden displacement or transitions who urgently need safe, temporary shelter.

How we built it

We built HomeSurf with a Node.js backend with API created with Express, React frontend, and PostGreSQL database. The backend connects to the Google Maps API to pull real address data. We deployed it on Railway, then connected everything together so users can register as either a host or guest, and log in.

Challenges we ran into

Merge Conflicts, and database wasn't connecting to railway at certain points so it was hard to test it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished it

What we learned

Improvement on API usage, and Express.

What's next for CT63-JJADO-HomeSurf

We also plan to improve the UI, add user profiles, and polish the overall experience.

AI usage

We used AI to help with code redundancy, verfiy Schema and helped with the CSS

Share this project:

Updates