Marketplace@CU

The Columbia marketplace group on facebook has over 20k people but there is no app. The group is cluttered, posts are never updated and responses are slow. This app will provide a better experience.

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Inspiration

NYC is expensive. College is expensive. One of the best ways to save money as well as reducing our consumption is through a secondhand marketplace. There are over 20,000 members on Columbia's buying and selling group, but it is cluttered and impossible to search through. This app will help people save money on books, clothes and furniture.

What it does

The app is very simple. It facilities commerce between students on campus by introducing an app that allows users to post images of anything they wish to sell. The site will have various filters for different categories to make it much easier for people to sell or buy from our fellow colleagues.

How we built it

The app is built entirely on React Native with expo.

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately, two of my group members dropped out since it was our first time using this language. We spent a lot of time on the installation phase as there were a lot of dependency errors. I ran into issues implementing a top nav bar on top of a bottom nav bar. In the end, I scrapped that idea and used a modal instead. It was also challenging to code in React as it is very different from the HTML,CSS, JS combo I was familiar with. Sometimes I was not sure if I could write in Javascript or HTML. I also found it challenging figuring out the navigation system and how various screens communicate on the stack.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud to have resolved this through to the end and putting out a MVP that showcases the benefits this app could bring. I was frustrated many times but I am proud to have persisted through to the end and now I am much more comfortable working with React and now I can build more mobile apps when I want to.

What we learned

Probably to not use an unfamiliar language for your first hackathon. I think our group really liked our idea and the idea of a mobile app. None of us knew any mobile developing language and we still went with it.

What's next for Marketplace@CU

I want to finish implementing the rest of the features such as auth0, deeplinking to SMS and email, deploying to a cloud database, and then publish it on the appstore.

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