Housing Search for Ukrainian Refugees

Inspiration

As of February 2023, over 15 million Ukrainians have emigrated from Ukraine due to the Russia-Ukraine war. After hearing about how many people have had their lives turned upside down, I was inspired to help Ukrainian refugees find temporary housing. I accomplished this through my website.

What it does

My website searches for hotels within a provided location. The user can input the check-in date, check-out date, city, and the number of kids that will reside with them. The website will then provide three hotels along with information about them, such as their name, starting price, address, and image. A link to make the reservation is also supplied.

How I built it

I used Replit for the majority of the session, but I also VSCode when the Replit servers were down--this is explained in greater detail in the "Challenges I ran into" section. I coded it in HTML and Javascript. For the foundation of the website, I used a template that I found on w3schools (which I properly cited at the bottom of my website) and customized it to meet my needs. I used Booking.com API's to aquire the data.

Challenges I ran into

For a few hours during the hackathon, the Replit servers were down, so I had to copy my code over to VSCode and run it there; however, I had never used VSCode to run HTML files, so setting it up took a considerable amount time. It was also difficult to implement the hotel-finding API, but after intensive research, I made it work.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud mainly to be making a difference in a war, but also of the website I built in less than 10 hours. I ran into a lot of problems and bugs, but I persisted through them and made best use of the time I had to make a product that I am truly passionate about.

What I learned

I learned what a hackathon was since this was my time attending one. I also learned how to make a website in HTML as well as some additional Javascript commands.

What's next for Housing Search for Ukrainian Refugees

In the future, I would like to have additional functionality, such as changing the search radius and adding more pages to preserve the minimalistic view while allowing the user to view more results. I also hope to add this to buy a public domain and advertise the website to make it more accessible to those in need.

Built With

• html5
• javascript
• replit