Inspiration
Being a student is not an easy occupation. Before your grades, it matters that you're broke. What if you have an interview tomorrow, but you can't afford buying a suit? What if you want to go to the park in a bike, but you don't have one? What if you need a screwdriver but the closest hardware store is a mile away? Thinking about the times I have been in this situation, I came to realize that someone could lend me what I needed. To create a more united community, we should start by being generous. And this is what this app is all about.
What it does
It motivates people to post what they have to share with others, and what they are requesting. Very simply, it lets you search for an item that you are looking for. It lets you post an item as well. It uses twitter to keep track of the hashtags that should be used in every tweet to identify it as part of the movement: #CUShares. If you are in need of something, just go to the search bar and enter a keyword. If you are posting something to share, go to the embedded widget and post your tweet.
How I built it
We used regular html for the styling of the page. We used node js for our search engine. We used Sublime Text as our editor. We used Twitter APIs for the search engine. With patience and trial&error, we got it working.
Challenges I ran into
The first big challenge was implementing the search bar. We had the search box, but it didn't do anything. When it did, we were done. Another challenge was learning node js, since we didn't have a background on node. Oh, and a very frustrating challenge we ran into: getting a domain to work. We got our domain, tried using FTP, but it wasn't connecting. We tried so much more other stuff, until (5 hours later) the FTP icon finally came up in the domain website. We uploaded the files of the web app. Then we figure out domain.com doesn't support .ejs files which was the language of our main files.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We built this web app from scratch, using w3schools.com at the beginning. We started with nothing, to this. We feel really proud of our achievement, specially because we did this in a day. With more time, it would have had a lot of more features we had in mind (adding a profile, verification service, etc.).
What I learned
At first, you don't really need to know what you want to do. Time gives you the tools you need. We learned we could do something that meets our expectations if we put enough effort into it in a limited time. It also taught us that we don't need to fully understand a programming language to actually use it. And we learned Hackathons are fun!
What's next for CUShares
We want to make it only for CU students, and hopefully other schools will mimic as well. Therefore, we want to have the CUIT (Columbia University IT services) log in on the website, so it can be more customized for CU students. We also want to implement making a profile inside the web app. We would also like to make this into an actual mobile application.
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