Inspiration
We at our office use service like Uber (or Careem) everyday but it usually has a wait time and sometimes surge prices linked to it. At our office we started using our notice board to find people who live in same areas or travel on same routes so we can carpool together. If someone has a car, the other person can share fuel cost. If two people are calling Uber (or Careem) separately, they can call one together and split the cost. We have a team of 24 people who have booked a shared space in building that has a total of four companies (including us). A member from another company looked at our notice board and got interested in traveling with me. When traveling together we realized that we working on similar projects but using different languages. I was using Ruby and he was using PHP and we discussed the differences in both languages and learned which language does what part better or faster. Thats when i got this idea, where most apps like tinder link people for dating, maybe we could make an app that brings people with similar skills or from similar industry together. People can travel together once or on daily basis as long as they are using the same route.
What it does
Social Commute lets people register via facebook and create a basic profile. Then they can add their travel plans and choose if they want to share it with only registered users of our app who are their friends on facebook or with everyone on our app.
Then our app shows them trips having similar time, departure/arrival destinations from their friends or everyone (as selected above) and they can swipe right or left to like or unlike a trip plan.
If two people like each other like tinder, a match is received and they are connected together to chat with each other via fb messenger.
How we built it
We built the apis using ruby on rails and hosted on digital ocean. The iOS app was made in swift language. We are also planning to make android and web app but that may not be done within the deadline of this challenge,
Challenges
Getting the fb access token from mobile app and using it online on server side as oauth_token to load user info through rails koala gem. (https://github.com/arsduo/koala) If that had worked, that would have been great but for some reason we could not make it work. Maybe the tokens given to app and those given to website are different even if taken via same fb app. Also we literally got the idea like 5 days before deadline so time wasnt exactly on our side either. Would have been great if we could have made a web and android app also but i guess thats for future.
What we learned
Traveling with people from your industry is fun and car pooling better than Uber/Careem everyday.
What's next for Social Commute
Web and Android Apps
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