Inspiration
As first year students ourselves, we have recently gone through the not so smooth experience of seeking out a student residence building. I personally had to spend countless hours scouring through reddit, Facebook, and discord to see the actual opinions of the residences. It was here that we thought why not create a place for students to collaborate, share, and find opinions so that the whole process can be exponentially easier and less intimidating for future and current students seeking choices for student housing.
What it does
RateMyRez allows for users choose a student residence which then directs them to a review and opinion page for the chosen residence. Former students can leave reviews on their old homes, and new students can see all the previous reviews, which allows for better decision making and also saves time on am otherwise hefty and intimidating process. Refer to the for further clarification
How we built it
RateMyRez is a Python App built on Flask, integrated with a SQLite database. We utilized standard flask imports, as well as SQLAlchemy so that we can work with our database and store all of the reviews. HTML and CSS designs were used heavily to create a friendly UI/UX environment.
Challenges we ran into
Originally, we had trouble working with SQLite in Flask since we were originally only exposed to NoSQL databases like MongoDB. Once we figured out how to use our databases, we ran into greater issues with the CSS styling. We knew we wanted a simple yet elegant design, so our UI/UX required a lot of time and energy in order to pull off in the way we wanted. There was also the occasional Flask bug, which were a hassle to debug due to how complicated our code was getting, as we were still working with a new technology. Form handling bugs in specific were the real hurdles, but we managed to get pass them with paying attention to the SQLAlchemy documentation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very proud of the fact that we accomplished in competing a working, near fully functioning, prototype. At the moment RateMyRez achieves everything we were anticipating to build, with major room for expansion. We're also proud of our ability to handle new technologies such as SQLite with Flask. With the current state of our product, we're also content to say that we're definitely planning on expanding it's functionalities into a complete web app that students can anticipate using this enrolment year.
What we learned
I've also only really used databases with MERN-stack applications so using SQLite with SQLAlchemy in Flask was really a breath of fresh air, due to how simple and elegant it was. Form handling with Python and Flask was easily the best skill we've learnt from this experience, as before hand I've only built form handling apps with JavaScript, so learning about what Python can do is pretty nice. We also learnt about what can make a web app successful, which is offering a very in demand solution/service during specific times of the year. We anticipate that RateMyRez will see most of its visitors during the time when high school seniors or graduates are scouting out a student residence for their exciting future, which is the whole purpose of the app.
What's next for RateMyRez
We plan to expand RateMyRez to other universities, so that students across the world can have an easier time choosing their residence. We also plan on adding filters to sort for specific reviews with certain keywords, so that the general gist can be given easier to the user without them having to scroll through several reviews that are not really relevant to them. We also want to implement some sort of recommendation service through a survey using Machine Learning so students can get a faster idea of what they're looking for.
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