shelterme

Inspiration

To help connect those seeking shelter, food, or general assistance to local organizations.

What it does

Our app helps connect those seeking shelter, food, and/or assistance to organizations in the surrounding area. We do this by implementing an "easy to use" user interface that allows providers to create and broadcast up to date information including:

number of beds available within their organization
fees
age limitations
gender specifications
meal options
contact info
street address

This app is meant to be displayed similar to that of an airport arrival and departure board. We designed it to be broadcasted on screens at local community centers and homeless shelters around the country.

How I built it

This app was built using Ruby on Rails

Challenges I ran into

Working with relational databases and strong parameters
Using git as a team - many times we had difficulty figuring out how to manage conflicts
Visually manipulating pages using SCSS

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The website looks pretty! We got a good grasp of how to style pages after 6 hours
We're proud of the website concept. We believe this website would be of great value to DeKalb, Chicago, and the world!
We both worked very well together using Rails (Bradley has never used the framework before)
We ran into many mistakes and feel much more confident in navigating around those mistakes in the future

What I learned

It's easy to assume a project will be easier than it really is. In reality though, we learned that we have to be realistic and allow for time to make errors or run into learning curve roadblocks
We learned that it's very possible to quickly develop powerful web apps using the Rails framework. This is exciting!
Again, we learned that mistakes may not be pleasant but are a very important part of the learning process

What's next for Shelterme

We think Shelterme has tremendous opportunity now to provide a very valuable service to those in need. The development of this app will continue and we hope to be in the Chicago region very soon!