Reuse Vandy

Inspiration

Traditionally when students at Vanderbilt want to sell an item they no longer use they’ll post it on the group me channel and anyone who’s interested in that item can dm them and they have a conversation. From the standpoint of a developer though this method could be greatly enhanced in terms of User Experience and Design so we thought it would be nice if we could build a website and subsequently an iOS app to serve that purpose.

What it does

It enables students at Vandy (could eventually expand to other schools too) to purchase and sell items that they no longer use from other students in their community in a much more convenient manner. It offers all of the functionality previously captured in the reuse vandy group me and a more User friendly design and experience.

How we built it

We used React.js to build our front end and when items are posted from the front end we store them in a MongoDb collection alongside collections for users and notifications. We store the images and larger files in Amazon S3 and store the link to the files in MongoDB. We do all of the other functionality stuffs in the front end using React and Stream.io and handle the requests and data management in the backend with python and fast api.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of problems trying to design the messaging functionality and a lot of bugs while designing the front end that we had to stay up all night to fix. We also ran into quite a few issues trying to synchronize our dev environments and deal with the dependency issues

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re very proud of all we were able to accomplish in this short time. A few months ago neither of us had any experience whatsoever in building websites and after some consistent practice and effort we’ve managed to put together such a Herculean project in a short amount of time while learning a lot along the way. We couldn’t be prouder of ourselves

What we learned

Gained a lot of experience using React to design websites as well as connecting external api frameworks such as stream.io to our applications and ensuring they work seamlessly. Also gained experience using MongoDB and Amazon S3 to store and manage data

What's next for Reuse Vandy

We plan to build an IOS app and launch in the coming month so that Vandy student could try it out and see if they like it. If it’s a success we’ll scale it so that colleges other than Vandy can use as well.