Returnto.Me

Our Beautiful Homepage
my profile page.
Ugh, I lost my iphone!
Thank You! <3
Let me do the search for you!
Notification for searching an item
Brainstroming Time, we dont lose anything here!

_ "Faith in humanity restored by one angel at a time." _

Inspiration

When we forget our wallet at a public place, there’s not much we can do except go back and look around the area for it. But those who find a lost item, they can either bring it to a near shop, or hold on to it and ask around, or just leave the item there and hope for the best. In today’s technological culture, there should be a website that resolves this common occurrence.

Losing items and finding lost items are common issues. We want to provide a rewarding platform for the "right" thing to do: report a lost item. Returnto.Me, a web application, introduces a social twist to help promote the angel in us.

What it does

The service provides users who report finding a lost item to find users who report having lost a closely matched item. Users can be endorsed for finding and successfully returning lost items to their original owners. Endorsement comes in the form of a ranking system and rewards. For instance, a user can become an angel and gain monetary rewards.

How we built it

We built it using javascript, Node.js, Express.js, Mongoose, Mongodb, HTML/CSS.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was bringing together a group of people who had primarily back-end experience and a primitive understanding of javascript. For us, this was one of the first Restful web apps we implemented. So the primary challenge was tooling and designing.

Other challenges included implementing the ranking system/protocol for users. Also, we tried to use fuzzy matching logic/ ElasticSearch to match lost/found items in the database when returning the information to users who find items. However, the time remaining restricted our ability to integrate it with Mongoose.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing an actual server all within a javascript development environment is a great accomplishment, considering our level of understanding of the language. We are also very proud of the front-end UI. But in terms of collaborative development, we are proud of just being able to implement a Restful web application together.

What we learned

So much about Restful web apps, Mongodb, and github merging conflicts (-__-).

What's next for Returnto.Me

Implementing a smarter ranking system/protocol, and item-matching sysem.

Built With

Submitted to

Hack @ UCI

Created by

Worked on Mongoose Javascript API to communicate JSON data between frontend and backend. First time using the API, it was a little bit intimidating. Thanks to Thanapon's guidance, we managed to make a functional project.

Kevin Permana
I lead this team into building this web application. With my past experience with javascript web application, my role here is to make sure everyone learn how to rake advantage of the environment. I created the skeleton of this project and divide the tasks equally among teamates. Arlene and I developed the front end part. I incorporated my knowledge on javascript api such as jQuery as well as using bootstrap and css to create the web site. I also make sure that my front end is in sync with back end part.

Thanapon Sathirathiwat
I worked on implementing the server in Node.js and db management using Mongoose. I also helped develop the text-matching algorithm for items in the database.
And I also helped design the Rest web application.

Stanley Chen
Arlene Lim