Inspiration
In college, we often buy textbooks that we no longer need in the future. Whether it be for english class for the countless novels we read, or an algorithms class with a thick textbook that you've never read, we all have textbooks that we don't want, but others may need. One person's trash, another's treasure.
What it does
With this project, users can post textbooks that they have, along with a price they will sell it for. They will also post their phone number. Prospective buyers can find textbooks they would like to buy, and send the seller a text and exchange cash in person via venmo!
How we built it
Tecbook is a relatively robust yet standard webapp featuring a functional component based React frontend, as well as a Django backend. React creates API calls to Django, whether it be to query for existing sellings or to create a new selling. Users can also delete sellings that they listed!
Challenges we ran into
Being a hackathon in a short period of time, there were countless challenges in terms buildability. While using Django itself as a frontend and backend is very common, we wanted to interact React. However, React handles API calls differently than that of vanilla javascript (we can't use Ajax in React, had to use fetch). Being that we had to use fetch, we had to parse in the payload for a function differently than if it were in Javascript. Being that we wanted the webapp to be responsive and easy to use, we don't want the user to be navigating to too many panes or refresh their screen to see new listings when they post/remove a listing. Building an incredibly lightweight, responsive, and intuitive webapp where anyone can post a textbook within seconds was a big challenge we ran into, and one that needed careful planning to get over.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Even though we only had a short period of time developing this, we are proud of using a very professional stack with React and Django. The React and Django code is incredibly clean, with both being very separately coupled. It's very reasonable with the way the code is arranged to have a clear frontend and backend team to develop. Moreover, we are very proud of the styling of the website, as adding CSS makes the website visually pleasing to look at, which is crucial when using any website. We believe that the UI of the website is incredibly sleek, with users being able to post a textbook to sell within seconds, and buyers able to clearly see what textbook a user is selling, the class it's for, as well as the vendor's credentials.
What we learned
In this hackathon, we've learned that some sacrifices had to be made for code quality. It's not reasonable to expect a perfectly developed project, featuring clean APIs and a robust database. Even though we had a Django backend, there actually is no Database (everything is stored in a variable in the backend). While this isn't ideal, it gets the job done for a hackathon and we are proud with the final product we've made.
What's next for TecBook
There are countless improvements to be made for Tecbook. It would be incredible if users could search up for a specific class they want to buy a textbook for, as well as sorting the listings by price. Currently, only people wanting to sell textbooks can make a listing. If users wanted to post that they wanted to buy a book (a buy request, instead of a selling), that would create a 2 way market stream that would make things easy for both parties (people selling and buying books). Next, Tecbook can expand to other colleges, rather than only for Georgia Tech, allowing students from other schools to post their textbooks for their own schools' 'Tecbook'
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