SFULoop

A ride share app for SFU students to find solo drivers going to either the Surrey or Burnaby Campus for classes, preventing parking overflows, strained transit options and unnecessary emissions.

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🛠️ SFULoop

🚀 Inspiration

SFULoop was born out of the SFU Ride Share hackathon challenge — a chance to rethink how classmates connect for daily commutes between bustling campuses like Burnaby and Surrey, while staying grounded in an Expo-managed React Native experience.

💡 What It Does

The app greets students with a warm, illustrated home hub that remembers their nickname, lets them toggle between driver or rider roles, and pairs free-form origin inputs with quick shortcuts to LiveRide and ScheduledRides journeys. A streamlined sign-in flow captures essentials such as nickname, gender preference, and SFU email verification, while clear API placeholders mark where future profile and maps integrations will land.

🏗️ How We Built It

We layered an Expo-managed React Native foundation with focused domain modules — navigation, features, stores, services, and utilities — so each part of the commute story has a clear home in the codebase. Guardrails like Jest, React Native Testing Library, Playwright, and CI automation keep the experience reliable as we iterate, ensuring coverage across stores, navigation, and API stubs.

⚙️ Challenges We Ran Into

Carving out a polished MVP meant living with intentional gaps: today, our profile and maps APIs still throw TODO errors, and the roadmap calls for deeper integrations like AsyncStorage persistence, Google Places data, and richer ride contexts.

🏆 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

We delivered a home screen that feels friendly and informative, backed by role-aware quick actions, and upgraded sign-in capture without losing the SFU email safeguards — all within a compact hackathon timeline.

📚 What We Learned

Balancing delightful UX and resilient engineering led us to patterns like KeyboardSafe, which keeps key actions within reach, and to rigorous testing that accelerates future backend work without sacrificing confidence.

🔮 What’s Next for SFULoop

Next up:

  • Persist profile details to Firebase.
  • Swap campus selectors for Google-powered discovery.
  • Thread role context through downstream rides.
  • Bring LiveRide and ScheduledRides maps to life with real navigation overlays.
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Updates

posted an update —

We we're a little strapped for time throughout the process and we were using emulators for the APIs so that we can develop fast, but with this solid framework, we could go on to build a fully-fledged app with minimal cost-of-operation and high impact, given the time and resources.

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