Roommate Rumble

Inspiration 🤩

Our inspiration for our project stems from our current experience as an incoming freshman to university. We KNOW that chores will be a big part of our lives and we will be dragging our roommates to do them. We also know that a lot of people are motivated by competition. So what do we do? Well of course we make an app that turns a burden into a friendly competition or even just a way to track your progress!

What it does 🤔

Roommate Rumble will let you create and join groups of roommates, post chores to be completed with a description and point value, sort chores based on completion, mark them as completed, track everyone's score, and reset it at the end of each week. The app has a leaderboard which will show everyone's progress and let your ego grow when you see yourself in the top spot 😎

How we built it 🔧

We built our project using the NextJs app router, material UI frontend, a neon database backend, and Vercel for deployment. At the beginning of the hacking period we all started brainstorming ideas and Roommate Rumble is what we came up with. After we had our idea we decided to go with NextJS because we had some experience with it and it simplified a lot of things for us along with free deployment. We used the liveshare extension because it allowed us to share localhost servers over the internet and edit with each other live.

Challenges we ran into 😭

We ran into a lot of difficulties with our database since we had a database that would automatically create tables and populate them. To fix these took a combination of debugging, collaboration and sitting down and thinking about a proper solution.

A lot of our time was spent working on customizing the somewhat outdated style of Material UI. We also struggled with our UI design, we had some interesting UI decisions. To fix this we didn’t hesitate to ask one of our mentors Araf for help. He gave us some pointers for our design and gave us encouragement to push through.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🥳

Since ¾ members have never been to a hackathon before, we are extremely proud of completing the project on time and following through with our idea.

What we learned 😁

We learned quite a bit of how NextJS works. We are now much more proficient than before in NextJs, React, Html and Typescript after completing this project since it was the first time for almost all of the teammates to make a website.

All of us gained skills in SQL and database management for making our backend solution work, previously only two of our teammates had experience with SQL but now all four have a much better understanding.

What's next for Roommate Rumble

Given more time to polish the project, we definitely would have added a verification system, where only other group members can verify your tasks.

Other than general UI improvements, here are some exciting ideas for future improvements:

Improved User System: Integrate email authentication for a better register and sharing process
Global Leaderboards: Introduce standardized point systems for global rankings to foster competition among more users
Recurring Chores: Allow users to set up and manage recurring tasks for greater convenience.
AI-Generated Chore Images: Automatically generate chore-related images if users do not upload their own.
Betting Feature: Introduce a fun betting element to increase engagement and motivation.