RouteMates

Inspiration

We were inspired by two things: our concern over global warming, and our mutual hate for traffic. Global warming is a pretty obvious one as each year we are closer and closer to the point of not being able to halt and reverse it. And everyone hates rushing our traffic.

So how are we planning on tackling these issues?

Carpooling, that's how. We made an app that helps drivers willing to drive others and the riders who need a ride to a destination find each other. In this way we a) decrease the amount of pollution b) decrease the amount of time we have to be

How we built it

For the backend, we used Django. For the front end, we used react.js and tailwind. For the distance calculations and the sort, we used Google Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenging part of this project is our inexperience with the platforms and technologies we decided to use. For example, this was going to be both of our first times using Django so it was a pretty rough learning curve as we had to figure out not only how to get Django to work, but also how it would interact with our front end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The two proudest moments of our project were when laughably we finally got Python to work in vscode followed closely by when we finally finished the assignment. For the better part of 2 hours, we just struggled to get our foot off the ground as for some particular reason, Python commands such as pip and Django commands were not working in the vscode terminal. We finished the project today morning, after working for all of yesterday and today morning. We even thought that we might miss the deadline, but thankfully we didn't.

What we learned

Firstly, vscode does not use the same environment paths as the command prompt or any of our native shells so there will be times in which something runs perfectly in the command prompt but does not work at all in vscode. The work around to this is by running vscode as admin which worked out great for us. Second, always read documentation carefully. Don't skip around as there will be information that pertains to your problem somewhere but you probably skimmed or skipped past it. That happened to us quite a few times.