Roomie

With Roomie, finding roommates at UC Berkeley is as easy as swiping right on those who matched with you based on our advanced algorithm. Select your preferences: housing, price range, interests, etc.

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Roomie: Find your Roomies.

What is Roomie?

Introducing Roomie, an algorithm-based roommate matching app for UC Berkeley students. When we started working on this project for Cal Hacks 8.0, we knew that there was too much to implement in too little time. That being said, we'll be showing you the product as it would have been (and will be) implemented!

How we built it

Roomie was built with copious amounts of caffeine from Caffe Strada lattes, and–no, really–lots of Swift, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Photoshop, and Figma. Future versions of the app will implement in-house chat and file-upload features using E2E encryption from The @ Company.

How does it work?

When users download Roomie from the iOs and Android app store, they'll be asked to create a profile with more information about themselves as well as select their housing & roommate preferences: location, price range, number of roommates, sleep schedule, major at UC Berkeley, and more! B

Behind the scenes, Roomie will take in a user's preferences and their associated weightings and allow the user to swipe left and right on Roomies that are closely aligned to that user's preferences. Our algorithm ensures that users will only see Roomies with similar preferences and that users will only connect with Roomies with whom they find themselves interested in living with at UC Berkeley! This adds another layer of security when it comes to finding the right Roomie.

Challenges with implementation

Neither Alex nor Will had any experience in programming language Swift, so learning the language in such a short window of time made for some stressful nights and early mornings. As opposed to working solely on the iOs application, Will set out to develop the website to display the app while Alex worked on writing Swift code, building the user interface, and bringing our ideas to life

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have made a functioning website with animation that will hopefully bring attention to our project for the future. We are also proud to have creating a sample iPhone application that gives us confidence in our ability to fully implement our application over time as we learn more backend/frontend development. We were also able to think up a matching algorithm that we truly believe will make the best matches possible for all of our users.

Lessons for the future

We realize that our idea is one to keep, and we intend on pursuing the full development of an iOs and android app with a beautiful user interface by Fall 2022. For now, this app will be exclusive to UC Berkeley students. To expand to your University, please contact either Will or Alex.

What's next for Roomie

We have a lot more planning and fine-tuning to do before we start to learn the nitty gritty about Xcode and iOS development. Once we iron out our idea, create more prototype apps in Figma, and deploy our algorithm in javascript to test on sample inputs, we will start to build the app in Swift and have our friends try it out before we launch it on the App Store.

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