NYU Living

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Search Tool

Inspiration

NYU is a big school and it may be intimidating to meet new people and create new social circles. In addition, New York City is fairly expensive. Put the two together and most students have a hard time finding their place. This pressure made us to investigate options for finding appropriate housing options. Our platform relieves this pressure by promoting both cost-efficiency and social-gathering through home sharing between students.

What it does

NYU Living serves as an index for NYU students to post their offered shared housing arrangements. Whoever wants to view offers can either elect for a comprehensive list or use NYU Living's search engine to browse their options with regards to price, location, and tenant requirements. Future implementations include a match making system based on similar hobbies and interests as well as other categories. This will lead to housing arrangements are more tailored towards the individuals using our services.

How we built it

The minimum viable product (MVP) was built using powerful and versatile tools including Node.js and MongoDB. This enabled the rapid development of said MVP. Node.js was used as a web-serving platform as it enables quick asynchronous serving of data. MongoDB is the perfect database system for a Node.js application by promoting easily designed schemas and rapid deployment. Both tools are widely used and a vast documentation is available.

Challenges we ran into

Especially for events that are condensed on time, it was hard to collaborate as a group in terms of which features we wanted to get done, and at times were very ambitious in our efforts when it came to discussing what we wanted our final product to look like. In addition, using group collaborator tools like Github caused a slight lag in early development for people who had not been familiar with forms of version control.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the application that we have built for several reasons. First our team consisted of a variety of different background and we managed to work well together and apply each team member's strongest skills to project. While we were relatively new to the tools used, we are proud of the progress have made in acquiring the necessary skills to complete this project. Additionally we managed our limited time well through pair programming and work re-partition.

What we learned

It's OK to be ambitious and to have high hopes for what you want to achieve, but it's also important to be realistic and to just have fun during the event. Hack-a-thons encourage both social interaction and learning. It's better to stay in the spur of the moment rather than constantly planning. At the end of the hack it's really about working as a team and making the best of the time you're given.

What's next for NYU Living

NYU Living has a bright future. We are planning on improving the platform to create more complex search and matching algorithms. These will enhance the overall quality of the services leading to greater adoption by students who want to both be more social and live in the city for a fraction of the cost.