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Landlady checks her dashboard.
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Student browses housing options near his university
Inspiration
One of the biggest nuisances of being a university student is finding a place to live after first-year. It is hard to figure out where to start and what to look for and on top of all that, keep up with school. There needed to be a simpler way. Thus, HomeHub was born!
What it does
HomeHub connects landlords/rental companies to students looking for student housing options after their first year of university. One can either sign up as an "Owner" or a "Tenant." Owners will use HomeHub to list their properties for rent and Tenants can then see what's available around them. Tenants can then compare available options based on price, location, reviews, etc. After a rental period is completed, the Owners and Tenants will rate each other, which will let future Owners/Tenants get a feel for who they are doing business with.
How we built it
We divided the website building process into two parts. The front-end was the features which the users interacted with directly and was created using React. The back-end was more complicated and required the combination of Express.js and MongoDB for organizing and storing user information safely and securely.
Challenges we ran into
We are decent programmers, but this was also our first hackathon so we had to learn most of the concepts and language implementations in overnight. We realized that using Angular would have been more efficient than React since we all knew HTML and CSS but decided we wanted to try something truly challenging and something outside of our comfort zone. We also faced a lot of struggles trying to use MongoDB with Express because there was a lot of in-depth knowledge we needed to know for MongoDB to utilize its full potential. Even though a few members in the group have back-end experience, this was truly a very challenging web app.
What we learned
During the event, we learned how to collaborate effectively with team members, the general process of the development of a product and skills like version control, advanced syntax, and terminal commands.
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