Crib Crew

Inspiration

Finding student housing can be difficult a lot of the time, especially finding groups of people that match what you are looking for with similar living styles, as well as finding houses that have the right number of rooms/bathrooms and price range for rent. We wanted to find a way to make it easier for students to find both roommates and houses all in one place, and also make it easier for the landlords to keep track of who is interested in living in their house.

What it does

The application is divided into two sections: "Roommate" and "House." In the "Roommate" section, users can swipe through profiles of potential roommates. These potential roommates are individuals who have indicated similar preferences and living habits. Users can read more about these potential roommates before deciding if they are someone they would be willing to live with. In the "House" section, users can swipe through potential houses that match their specified criteria and decide if it is a house they would want to live in. If a user likes a house and there is someone they liked in the "Roommate" section who also liked the same house, the application will suggest that these users become roommates for that house and book a showing together.

How we built it

The app was primarily designed and built with a Next.js frontend and an Express.js backend. We divided the work between the frontend and backend, focusing on designing the user flow and defining the required user objects for our PostgreSQL database. These objects determined the API routes and the requirements for creating a user interface that was both visually appealing and engaging for users.

Challenges we ran into

There are many features we wanted to add to this application, but having all the parts working in the time frame ended up being challenging and we were unable to do a lot of what was in our plan for the application. Thus, time management was our biggest challenge and required us to prioritize the essential features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our first hackathon project, so we are proud we are able to produce something, even if it is not to the full scale of what we initially thought of at the beginning of the hackathon. We believe that the idea is good/worth pursuing, and that is another thing we're proud of. It addresses an issue that we directly took from our shared experience, and we derived a software solution from it, although incomplete, We believe in time we could build on it.

What we learned

There are a lot of parts involved in creating an application like this. Figuring out the connections between users and houses and how to implement those is not an easy task and takes time to figure out. We realized that rather than sorting out edge cases in the design, it's better to deal with them/iterate as they come in a time paced environment like this one. It was a fresh experience for all of us so we were grateful to receive the opportunity to learn where we had our pitfalls to improve from in the future!

What's next for CribCrew

There are times when people already have a couple people in mind they want to live with and are looking for some other people to join them in a house. Implementing group profiles, where multiple people can be treated as one unit looking for housing, is a future goal. We would also like to ensure that the core functionalities of logging in, user profiles and automated booking requests would be apart of the full user experience in the future.

Built With

• npm
• postgresql
• python
• react
• vite
• yarn