Hey Neighbor!

profiles
before sending goods
after

Inspiration

We were inspired by one of the sponsors, Snag, that had the idea to have an app for a local college community. We thought that idea would be interesting but for trading for goods instead of going to the nearest grocery store because it's free! The idea of going back to bartering was also pretty funny.

What it does

It allows users to create an ID for themselves, create values and send or trade objects they have to others. They can set their profile pictures as well.

How we built it

We built a basic CRUD app, making our own API endpoints in the back using App Router from Next.js with Mongoose over MongoDB. A lot of our front end was built using Claude, also using App Router to format the pages with a navbar at the top as well.

Challenges we ran into/accomplishments

3 out of the 4 of us were beginners, so having to cram learning a lot into a one day time frame was really stressful. The drive didn't help. But despite that we managed to make our own API and integrate Claude into our workflow in a really neat way, learning essential parts of frontend libraries like the useState and useEffect hooks in React and of backend principles like implementing basic requests out of necessity while making really nice UIs with shadcn.

What we learned

We learned how important the architecting stage really is because we kind of just went for it and this resulted in a lot of janky code. Next time we definitely would consider integration before just coding stuff because we had a lot of use cases on the front end that the API didn't really consider.