SuiteSync

Inspiration

As college students, we've all run into the struggles that come with looking for a place to live. We remembered the stress of juggling classes, deadlines, and exams while also dealing with leases packed with legal jargon, hidden fees, and intense competition for housing. That's why we set out to build something to help students like us find housing.

What it does

SuiteSync makes apartment hunting in Blacksburg simple and collaborative. Instead of endless iMessage group chats and messy spreadsheets, you and your roommates can search together in real time, online. Even if you're the most indecisive person on earth, our pairwise ranking algorithm (powered by binary search) helps you narrow down options quickly and effortlessly. Best of all, everyone's opinions are captured on one platform!

How we built it

We spent a significant amount of time brainstorming ideas and ruling them out (shoutout to Excalidraw), and another large chunk of time finding the data to power our product. In some ways, the programming component was almost easier.

Challenges we ran into

Websockets. Webscraping. Honestly, we think that sums it up, but dealing with real-time synchronization and messy site structures led to plenty of trial and error.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Finally defeating the evil websockets
• Building something functional (and actually helpful) in less than 36 hours
• Having too much fun for being sleep deprived people who stared at a screen all day

What we learned

Websockets are hard. Webscraping is hard. And staying up until 8 am staring at a million red squiggles teaches you more about perseverance and passion (and caffeine) than a class ever could.

What's next for SuiteSync

First, sleep! After that, we want to polish our interface (we have a member who has a very, VERY fine eye for detail), expand the recommendation engine, and integrate cool, useful technologies like Elasticsearch SQL.

Built With

• javascript
• python
• supabase
• typescript