LOKAL

Inspiration

As pet and homeowners, we felt that there was an untapped niche in this space; one that could benefit the community greatly. We feel that going on vacation should be effortless - but house and pet care commitments can get in the way. Security concerns in finding and hiring external help compounds the issue when friends and family are unavailable. Thus, our app, LOKAL, was born.

What it does

LOKAL stands as the perfect fusion of AirBnB and Rover, revolutionizing the way homeowners and renters connect with reliable home and pet caretakers. Our platform not only streamlines the search process with an intuitive interface but also strengthens community ties. With mandatory ID verification and address confirmation, Lokal guarantees trust by ensuring that qualified caretakers within your neighborhood take care of your home. We prioritize your peace of mind by enabling thorough vetting through candidate reviews, facilitating confirming chats, and providing real-time task monitoring through a dynamic to-do list. Experience a secure and convenient solution that redefines the landscape of home and pet care with LOKAL.

How we built it

We initialized a Vite project, and built the entire front end using ReactJS. For our backend, we used a JSON server, as we felt that it was the simplest solution to our needs. For styling, we used vanilla CSS, although we hope to learn TailwindCSS in the future for simpler styling syntax.

Challenges we ran into

We faced challenges essentially immediately. Our first backend solution was a Flask API in Python, which was to be consumed by ReactJS. However, we could not get that solution to work, so we opted for the simpler JSON server. Many times over the course of our project, things were going wrong. We did not have much experience working in groups with Git, so there were some instances of merge conflicts that were difficult to reconcile. On top of that, there were several times where our logic would break for no reason, and then resume working in 10 minutes as if it never happened.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We overcame all our challenges and made it to the end with a complete project. We also did not sleep very much so we know we were working hard.

What we learned

Next time, we may have to pick a more appropriate scope of project, to ensure that we have adequate time to rest and not have to rush and toil through the night.

What's next for LOKAL

In future iterations of LOKAL, payment integration can be utilized to enable monetization. We also see a full neighborhood integration in extended features, such as forums, buy and sell, or hobby groups.