Inspiration
Me and many of my friends fly back home to the Bay Area for vacation and the weekends, but often fail to find people who are also Ubering at the same time because of inefficiencies and lack of coordination. This often results in a 45 dollar Uber to the airport in which I could have saved at least 75 percent of that finding 3 other people to share a ride with. Therefore, me and my friends came up with R'Pool, a surefire way to find others to split a ride with to the airport or to campus from the airport.
What it does
Basically R'Pool is a unified platform on which UCR students can create an account, and find other posts from other students who are also going to the airport from college or vice versa. When they find a post that is coordinated with the time that the student wants to go to the airport, they can join the group and pool with the other people in the group. The student / user can also create their own post to find other students who are also traveling to the airport in order to save money.
How we built it
We utilized React and TypeScript for our front end, to design the website and integrate the backend, with which we used Firestore and Firebase to keep track of our data. We also utilized Google OAuth for a more secure login experience and increased efficiency.
Challenges we ran into
Integrating the Uber API into our application was one of our biggest struggles. Uber requires you to ask permission from them to use their API in order to extract the prices of the uber ride so our team leader Justin came up with his own custom API in which he was able to extract the prices from a web source. Some other challenges were using the different technologies when some of us did not know how to use them so we all had to learn on the fly, but overall we overcame those obstacles and created a presentable project for those to use.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the effort we put in into this application, because 12 hours to create an application of this potential magnitude is a short amount of time, and working from 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening consistently with minimal breaks requires a great amount of mental fortitude and coordination.
What we learned
We learned how to collaborate effectively with the same codebase, as all of us had varying code, which caused a plethora of merge conflicts, but we all worked together to be more coordinated and eventually start producing code in a seamless manner. We also learned new technologies, as some of us did not have the skills we had gained during this experience, and how to use these skills in a short time crunch to develop a functioning project is something one has to learn through experience, and is something we all learned.
What's next for R'Pool
This idea is a very useful idea and has large implications for the UCR student population. Once this competition is finished, we plan to furnish the UI and increase the efficiency and functionality of the web application so that other students can use it. Eventually we will also host this web application for the public to see too.
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