parkIt

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Inspiration

As a student with a car, finding a place to park is pretty difficult most of the time you end up paying a lot to park in a lot, or you park in a driveway nearby. We wanted to make the process of figuring that out a bit easier to navigate

What it does

parkIt acts currently as a marketplace to find more affordable parking spots being rented out by others. We allow for user searches, post creation, post favorites and email contact for posts you may be interested in.

How we built

While I(Amitai) mostly on the backend building a django rest framework while also helping out a little with the frontend, while my partner(Josh) focused mainly on building the backend out with react, typescript and tailwind.

Challenges we ran into

After coming up with the idea and starting we learned that there is a similar app called SpotHero, however we deemed it wasn't too much of an issue as we are tackling a different pain point than the problem that SpotHero solves.

We also had to make sacrifices in some services due to time constraints, so we weren't able to setup a map to show the user where each parking spot given their location.

Along the way we ran into a few technical issues: Frontend:

passing data from child to a parent
posting formData to backend
changing values from one specific object in arr of objects(like button)

Backend:

Managing some token authentication as well as user authentication
Ensuring our json output was formatted correctly, especially with a somewhat weird Django model.
Image uploading and email service, smtp was rather tough.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Really great communication/teamwork
Consistent integration between frontend and backend
Email service
Having clear expectations for your partner's code

What we learned

We had to sacrifice some features to focus on our most important things, which meant features like maps got scrapped, but that was better than wasting time and not having a MVP(Minimum viable product).
Time constraints are a challenge, but also can be really motivating.