Hello Roomie!

Inspiration

I started studying remotely as an international student at the University of Waterloo from my home country Nigeria in 2020 due to the pandemic. International students were not allowed to travel to Canada not until November 2020 and at this time I started making plans to travel to school in January and one of these plans included getting accommodation and finding roommates from school that could join me in my apartment as my roommates so we can split bills, Learn together, challenge each other and also keep each other company. It was very difficult for me to connect with anyone for that purpose and I ended up paying for an apartment and getting placed with random people as my housemates which I was sad about. I came to Canada in January wishing that there was an app that would have helped me to connect with other people from my school who were also looking for roommates and shared similar interests with me.

This experience birthed the problem statement for our project: " How might we, connect students searching for roommates together and also help them find the best match based on their interest, choices and personality. "

My Experience (Siraj Khanna)

In my first hackathon, I had a great experience and gained lots of valuable experience. Being able to work with and learn from many experienced programmers has been incredible. I was able to learn and develop my skills in frontend development using JavaScript and React Native, and I was happy with the progress that I was able to make along with my team. Also, I learned about collaborating with group members to create code together, while being restricted by a tight time limit. All in all, Hack the North 2020++ has been a great experience, and a valuable learning opportunity where I was able to learn a variety of skills alongside other programmers.

What it does

The app asks you for your school, program, degree and year of study, it collects your personality information like language, sleep pattern, nationality, gender, allergies etc and it collects preferential information that helps to determine the people that would be suggested to you on your timeline such as pets, smoking habit, how far off-campus you can leave, pet peeves, interests etc. After this information is provided then the app would search and start to suggest different student profile's that may look like what you want. then as each profile pops up, you decide if it's a good potential roommate or moves to the next. A match happens when two people are suggested to each other and both accept the suggestion.

How we built it

The Prototype was built using Adobe xd. The frontend work was programmed in JavaScript using the react native framework.

Challenges I ran into (Adaobi Pius):

One of the challenges we ran into as a team was not being able to finish up populating our database and backend codes due to the short time as we spent a lot of our time on ideation.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of: I proud that I was able to finish the entire prototype in less than 24hrs while finishing up school deadlines, that's a superpower. I am also proud that I coordinated the entire team and it was a very positive and Optimistic team.

What I learned

I learned about cockroach DB from one of the developers in my team, I learnt that diversity in a team is actually the spice of the team and not a limitation our different backgrounds were a major bonus to our ideation.

What's next for Hello Roomie!

I Would love to complete this application and work with my team to launch it and have students start to try it out, as time goes by we would love to add a group feature where you can register as a group of roommates looking for more people to join and complete an apartment and montize it with Ads from landlords for good apartment deals around the school for students.

Built With

• adobexd
• javascript
• react-native