Roomate

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Inspiration

Moving into the dorms our freshman year of college, we found it hard to meet new people until one eventful day, when I went to knock on my neighbors' door because I needed milk for my cereal. Luckily for me, they had the milk, but that wasn't the most important part of the interaction - our newly formed friendship was. From then on, we realized the importance of building a community within our shared space. This inspired Roomate.

What it does

Roomate is an app that aims to foster a community by facilitating interactions between people who live in the same building. It gives users an opportunity to leverage the resources that others have, and through it, form meaningful relationships just like we did in our freshman year.

You can sign up on the app when you move into a new building, and you can post on the app when you need something. Other people in your community can choose to fulfill your request if they have what you need.

How we built it

We used the Ionic mobile app development framework with React JS. We utilized Firebase in the backend for our database.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time utilizing Firebase and Ionic. We had to spend a lot of time teaching ourselves how everything works and how to connect everything together when we were done with our individual components. We got a lot more practice with debugging in an unfamiliar environment as well!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our commitment and determination in seeing this through end-to-end! We ventured out of familiar territory and built an app using foreign frameworks.

What we learned

We learned a lot about system architecture, as we spent a lot of time planning and diagramming our project, and what we thought would be best to code it in. We also learned a lot of technical programming skills by pushing ourselves with the frameworks we used.

What's next for Roomate

We have a lot of features planned for Roomate! First, we want to implement a point system so that people feel more motivated to use our app and can use the points to do things within their community and receive prizes. We also wanted to implement filters on the postings, so users can easily track their own requests and filter through all the replies. We would also like to implement a more pleasing UI as we ran out of time and weren't able to do that!