Sick Rides

Inspiration

We wanted to tackle an environmental issue whose solution would not only significantly reduce emissions, but also make people's lives more convenient. As college students, ride sharing is very common due to budget constraints. However, the current system in place on Facebook has a very poor setup due to the limitations of Facebook in organizing a large system of requests and replies. Our hope is to (eventually) create an app that would provide a more intimate and less hectic communication between drivers and riders.

What it does

Riders and drivers sign up for separate accounts. Riders send out the requests, drivers see the requests and message the riders. Riders then message back and confirm with the driver. Drivers can also post their availability status.

How we built it

We built Sick Rides on a web browser, and we used Bootstrap, Javascript/jQuery, HTML5/CSS3 for front-end. For back-end, we used PHP and MySQL with phpMyAdmin as a GUI to handle the large databases.

Challenges we ran into

We had a submission problem. We tried to create our domain, sickrides.tech (or .org), but the site would not let us; therefore, we were unable to deploy our code onto the domain. :-(

We tried implementing a Chatbot AI into our web server, but ran into some errors. We also had never set up a local web hosting service on our computer, so that was a fun challenge to set that up. Some data types in SQL are not well represented, like the time of day, so we had to work hard to figure out an efficient way to store that data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was a learning experience for the both of us. We got to learn more about the server side of web development and storing user information into a database. Additionally, in an attempt to create our Chatbot AI, we learned how to code in node.js and use cloud services. PHP is not an easy language to use; we're glad we overcame those demons.