Inspiration
Being graduate engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania, my teammate and I often need to study on campus in order to get our projects done on time. Throughout the years, we found that we waste much time trying to find available study locations that suit our needs.
What it does
StudySpotter is a dynamic web application that shows its users available study locations for a given time period. Users are able to search for available locations in our database or view all locations. We currently support coffee shops and bookstores in the Philadelphia area, classrooms in Levine Hall, and group study rooms in Van Pelt. When the user views the details of a location, it shows them the address, the available times, a picture of the location, and a map. Users can log in to provide updates on which locations are available at which times.
How we built it
We build this web app using Bootstrap with jade and html5. We are hosting this site on a Linux server, on which we installed MongoDB and Node.js. We are using Node.js for networking and MongoDB to store our user information.
Challenges we ran into
The first challenge we ran into was configuring our local environment with Node.js and MongoDB for testing purposes. We originally ran the code on our machines (localhost) in order to test changes more quickly. The next challenge we had was deciding how we would host our website. We originally had planned on hosting it on Microsoft Azure, but after having challenges getting MongoDB to run on it we decided to abandon this idea and simply provision a Linux server from Linode and host our website there. The final challenge we had was getting our code to run on the Linux server. After FTPing our code, we found that we had to make some changes to the folder structure to get the website to display correctly.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One accomplishment of which we are proud is getting the web app hosted on the Linux server and running correctly. Not having much experience with Linux and hosting websites, my teammate and I overcame many challenges. Another accomplishment of which we are proud is developing a modern-looking website. We decided to use high-resolution pictures that took up the entire screen and large buttons to make the user interface more intuitive. We found that this not only tested our coding ability, but also our designing skills.
What we learned
We learned much about coding in throughout this hackathon, and especially improved our front-end skills. We learned how to divide the workload in an efficient manner so that both team members can be contributing simultaneously to the project. We learned about website design, and how to draw mock-ups.
What's next for StudySpotter
We plan on integrating other functionality into our web app. Some examples include adding support for OpenID logins such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft for users who are more comfortable logging into those platforms rather than our system. We also plan on integrating Uber functionality for users to request rides to study locations.
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