HoneyComb

Inspiration

For many students at Georgia Tech, one of the burning questions at the back of the mind is what we're going to do with our lease if we study abroad in the fall/spring, or when we go back home for the summer. For students coming to Atlanta over the summer for internship opportunities, the opposite question—where do I live over the summer? Our team saw Georgia Tech students fret over this issue time and time again, frantically texting large Groupme's looking for subleases only to get no response and be drowned out over a multitude of spam. When students found a sublease, they had no insight into their potential roommates, and basically jumped in blind to live with them for an extended amount of time. Our team came together this hackathon to try and solve this issue in a way that allows students to find sublease options that work for them, and roommates whom they'd thrive with as they sublease

What it does

Our website connects students searching for a place to stay with sublease listings around Georgia Tech. Our sorting algorithm filters the listings by price (because we're not made of money), proximity to a central location such as the CRC or an internship office in midtown, and to ensure a good fit with potential roommates, we also look at any instagram mutuals to try and foster a connection before you move in.

Users see the sorted list of sublease options tailored to their preferences, and then can look at roommate profiles and information about the sublease to decide on what works best for them

How we built it

HoneyComb's front end was built using React, and we use firebase and Pandas dataframe for the backend. Each listing has a map in the expanded view that shows how far it is from the user specified central location, which we show using google maps API. To find instagram mutuals, we use a custom API and point built with instagram api, selenium and web scraping techniques

Challenges we ran into

We had some issues with figuring out how to find instagram mutuals and use Selenium as it was our first time, but through hard work and dedication we were able to work through it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

building the front end in the short time we had
integrating Google Maps API
Integrating our custom API to find instagram mutuals

What we learned

How to use React to build websites How to scrape instagram web data How to build a sorting algorithm that assigns prioritizes price and proximity How to use google maps API and embed a map in a website