23 Swipe

Our app connects college students with compatible roommates, making the search for a perfect match easy and stress-free. Say goodbye to lonely nights and hello to a happier dorm life!

Comment

```## Inspiration After a myriad of failed roommates experiences shared between our teammates with UMD's current portal and awkward Facebook posts, we sought to find a new, more modern way to this problem by formatting the experience similar to that of a dating app.

What it does

Within the scope of UMD, students can sign up for an account and fill out questions regarding themselves and their roommate preferences to build out their own profile. We take these suggestions and develop an order of precedence in which other students will be suggested as potential roommates depending on what a user looks for in a roommate. Students can look through the pool of students similar to that of a dating app by swiping left and right. If both students swipe right on each other, then both students will be given the opportunity to chat with each other. Consent is key!

How we built it

We started off with a figma file to layout all the components we wanted in our app. This served as a guideline as to what we needed to code. In the backend, we hosted our server that contains all our users and their preferences to AWS. In order for students to create an account, they must go through the google authentication log in process before they can start building their profile and matching. Additionally, we used React, JS, HTML, CSS and Bootstrap to create our front-end.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was doing the google authentication, setting up all the AWS services and deploying all of our work to be hosted on AWS. We were able to run the server locally but when attempting to host it so that other can remotely use it, we ran into many errors and issues. Additionally, we were very ambitious in what we could accomplish, specifically on the front-end since there are a lot of features that would make this app look more presentable with nice animations and designs but realized the time constraints were not enough to finish all of them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of all the work we put in to the full stack development process. Our team really worked together to learn a lot of new skills. For example, getting the AWS server running, creating the database and running all the SQL queries were really big accomplishments.

What we learned

Teamwork really goes a long way. We could not have gotten this far without any of our teammates and we are super grateful for the chance to work together and learn from each other. We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and we were able to cover each other's gaps in learning and get this far. Another thing we learned is to actually solidify an idea before we all start working. We had a figma file for the design but no concrete idea on how the backend interacts with the front end. Having an outline for this would have made the process more seamless.

What's next for Swipe

In an attempt to be all inclusive, we want to add features to make this more accessible for minority groups. We want to take things like gender and disability into account when creating the features of this app. Also, we actually plan on continuing this project and we are going to attempt to deploy it for UMD students as a test run. Eventually, we want this to be able to change based on the school a student attends. We also had ideas for adding more to the profile set-up, custom filters and also open-ended questions to make each profile stand out with a little personality. Finally, having a bot to manage and moderate chats in the event of misuse of the platform would be awesome.

Share this project:

Updates