Home Sweet Home

Inspiration

Determined to make use of the real estate data from CoStar Group and inspired by the myriad of Buzzfeed quizzes we’ve taken to derive some modicum of personality, our hack sought to link our users with their ideal living space in D.C. through the humor of seemingly unrelated questions.

From this idea, we decided to create a web application with a responsive form that would return different house listings depending on user responses (including user priorities) in order to help users find what they really want - a house to call home.

Given that this was many of our first hackathons as hackers, we tried our best to come up with something fun and interesting while utilizing our pre-existing knowledge and applying it to different technologies.

What it does

Home Sweet Home seeks to provide users with their ideal living space in the D.C. area by matching public real estate data to each user’s personal preferences - all wrapped up in some classic gen z humor.

Extending the matching capabilities beyond what is the most relevant to our real estate database, we allow the user to select what their priorities are and weigh the corresponding categories of filtration accordingly.

How we built it

CockroachDB (database hosting) Python Pandas and Numpy (data cleansing) Python Django (server side scripts) HTML, CSS, Bootstrap (front end)

Challenges we ran into

Django and HTML incompatibility with radio buttons >:C

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring out CSV migration for CockroachDB
Creating a dynamic website with Django
Deploying a website

What we learned

Teamwork makes the dream work: Even though all of us have different skill levels and fortes, it was everyone’s willingness to learn and fill in the gaps that allowed us to get as far as we did.
Debugging is the most important time sink - even if it feels like you could be getting further by ignoring a certain part of the project not working, getting something to work the way you intended is worth the time and effort.