hokiesWayHome

Team Photo!
Debugging together on the TV

Inspiration

Every Hokie runs into this problem at least once in their academic career: where am I going to live next year? popular real estate applications like Apartments.com, Zillow, and more are very powerful, yet can be very overwhelming to a young first time renter. Our mission is to simplify the process and facilitate an easier transition to off-campus living.

What it does

Hokies Way Home is a website that lists the popular apartment complexes in the Blacksburg area. It allows users to explore the features of a listing, such as amenities, distance to the nearest grocery store, the number of bedrooms, how close the nearest Blacksburg Transit stop, and etc. For example by clicking the name of Foxridge you'll immediately find that the average listing costs $600 a month, contains two bedrooms, and that a parking pass is not required.

How we built it

We used Python, HTML, CSS, Flask, Git, Github and MongoDB to create the core of our programming.

Challenges we ran into

We were ambitious for our first hackathon as a group. Where we were not familiar with any of the libraries and most of the languages used. While not necessarily a bad thing, we were not able to fully implement the scope of our project with in the allotted time. A majority of the time was spent researching and testing the necessary tools. That being said, our project is functional and accomplishes the fundamental purpose.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to implement dynamic URL routing to adapt to and automatically display an unlimited amount of housing options into our website. By clicking any option, users are lead to a page which dynamically changes to contain the corresponding details. Moreover, we are proud that we were able to learn and execute a Hokies Way Home. Our team had little to no experience using Flask, HTML, CSS, Python, Git, Github, and MongoDB, so we consider the knowledge gained an accomplishment in and of it itself. Furthermore, connecting the front end to our back end proved to be a rewarding endeavor. Watching our website come together proved to be exciting.

What we learned

Collaborating through Git as a team allowed us to gain experience with team-based programming. We also learned how to delegate tasks, coordinate meetings, set objectives, break down our project into a workable outline, debug live, use git and liveshare functionality, and articulate ideas in a timely manner.

What's next for hokiesWayHome

We plan to integrate Google Maps within our project to display housing option locations from the main page. We would also like to add features to enhance the user-experience, such as bookmarks for locations the user would like to save and refer back to.