Redclip

You want something? Don't want to pay for it? Trade for it! At Redclip, users trade their own items for other items of equivalent value instead of being bogged down by price tags and sclapers.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by a YouTube video where someone started with a red paper clip, then through a series of trades, acquired a house at the end. We like the idea of 'trading' and 'bartering' of items, especially when there is no monetary currency involved. Hence, our idea of the project named "RedClip" was inspired by that video.

What it does

This web application involves users being able to trade various personal items, goods, and other belongings to be traded with other users. Think of it as a Facebook marketplace, but it only involves trading items. We want regular people to be able to trade their way up to more valuable items too! Our project lets users login, register, navigate through the pages with redirects and browsing.

NOTE: We did not fully implement the site's main functions such as trading (offering, rejecting, counter-offering), dynamically generating items from the DB to the front-end, and adding RedClip points. However, we tried our best making it look pretty and you can add item, but nothing is displayed :(

How we built it

We built it using the MERN stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, ReactJS, and NodeJS) using Git + GitHub as version control and source repository.

Challenges we ran into

All of our group members had experience with Web Dev using Django, however, we were not proficient in JavaScript and had a lot of problems implementing basic website functions such as browse and search for items. We did not realize this tech stack was time-consuming and challenging so most of the time during the hackathon went to reading documentation, fixing a LOT of bugs, and receiving errors in which we could not understand. We felt that JavaScript was NOT similar to other programming languages that we are used to (Java, Python). NodeJS and ExpressJS was difficult for us since we developed the REST API Backend from scratch, it was not easy to find online sources for help specific to our problems and this kept repeating until we hit a true breaking point to stop. One more challenge was that our 4th member had to work with us virtually due to circumstances with family and this made it hard to delegate tasks to him consistently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the work ethic and self-motivation to make an attempt of building a web application using a Tech Stack that we were not familiar with. We enjoyed the learning process and reaching points where we had an 'ah-ha' moment. Though the end product was not what we expected, we still want to submit to show our progress of what we accomplished over the last 48 hours.

What we learned

The most important thing we had learned: building and developing teamwork skills! We value this experience because we understand at a real job environment, you will be constantly placed in different teams with different projects so it is important for the development of ourselves. We feel more comfortable being given a task we aren't familiar with and being able to break it down, strategize how to tackle the project with clear structure and bringing our imaginations to real life.

What's next for Redclip

We may/may not proceed in the future to return to the project and further implement the features, because we expect to encounter more technical problems with the Tech Stack since it is deprecated and we don't know if the code structure (did not implement good SWE design patterns) and API calls are 'mature' enough to be deployed and further developed. We love our idea, but we may have to rethink the Tech stack.

Thank you UGAHacks 7 Event Organizers and Sponsors!

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