Hospes

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Inspiration

14% of the American population are immigrants. The process of immigration is known to be lengthy, ardous and often isolating. We wanted to ease the burden of moving to a foreign country for the first time by connecting new/potential immigrants with others who already live in the country that share the same culture as them. With Hospes, immigrants can bring a piece of home with them when they leave.

What it does

Hospes acts as a hub, where hosts and guests can both create accounts and specify details such as their origin country, languages spoken, and dietary restrictions. Then guests can search, filter and book to connect or potentially live with hosts for a short period of time while they are adjusting to their life in a new country.

How we built it

We built this app using React.js, Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.

Challenges we ran into

We initially started using Django as the backend, but we ran into multiple issues with authenticating and seamlessly connecting the REST API to the React front-end. So we decided to pivot and solely focus on the above listed Tech Stack instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the fact that we were able to switch half of our tech stack mid-way through the hackathon and still produce something presentable. We are also proud of our host/property filtering system which was quite difficult to implement.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the importance of planning. We believe that we would have had a smoother workflow throughout the hackathon if we created alternative tasks that each member could work on if another member was stuck on something. That way we wouldn't have had all work halt if one thing wasn't working.

What's next for Hospes (Latin word meaning both "host" and "guest")

We imagined so much functionality built into this application that we didn't have the time to implement it. We will continue to work on this project and add live messaging features between hosts and guests, a blog/forum page where people with different Visa Status' can share advice and help each other out, and also a secure Immigration Lawyer recommendation system with validated and vetted lawyers who do their all to help with Immigration issues.