RateYourHousing

Inspiration

Webpages like RateYourProfessor and RateYourDorm are the main inspirations for our site.

What it does

Your presented with a map of Eugene, OR, populated by beacons representing apartment buildings in the area. You find your housing, leave a review, rate the housing 1-5 stars, upload any images if you'd like and others can see what you though of that apartment.

How we built it

This is a full-stack, single-repo web application built using a combination of Cursor IDE and VSCode + Copilot. Almost a completely vibe-coded application built on a React frontend + Node/Express backend. This webapp stores listings and reviews in a local SQLite database.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was collaborating smoothly across three devices. We tried using Supabase which we had never used before and couldn't get working, MySQL which I have most proficiency in but had trouble staying consistent over everyones devices, so we ended up with using a local SQLite database that must be populate if cloned from the repo but hand (you're given the listings in a json file and script that populates the db with the given .json)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Just getting reviews to stick in the database was a huge step and accomplishment. A newly added feature is being able to search for a listing that isn't present in the given .json by searching the actual map of Eugene, OR and giving users the ability to add any housing unit that wasn't already provided to you.

What we learned

I had never used React before so I learned what it looks like and its syntax. We had also never populated a SQLite database and actually had never vibe-coded a full-stack webapp before.