Warepair

Inspiration

As we walk or drive around our neightborhood or countryside, we can see many signs and flyers that were put out by individual contractor or freelancer that specializes in one or more area of home improvement and repair, such as plumbing, fixing leaky ceiling, installing thermostat and etc. Since we are students who have just started living on our own near campus, many problems that come up in our apartment can be a pain in the back to deal with, especially if it's something urgent to be fixed, such as a clogged toilet. We came up with this idea to pair up home improvement contractor and home/aparment owners so that everybody can be beneficial from this SaaS.

What it does

Warepair is a web app that bridges the gap between home improvement contractors/freelancers and homeowners. It is a platform that allows contractors and clients to easily find each other.

How we built it

For frontend, we used React and other libraries to provide a minimalistic user interface for ease of use. For backend, we used Python and Flask to set up RESTful routes to value and respond to every single user input. It also acts as the middleware for us to perform CRUD on our Postgresql database. It is a relational database that allows us to have the same userid even when the user can both a contractor and homeowner. Using relationship database also helps us to perform data analytics in the future.

Challenges we ran into

On the second day of the hackathon, we realized that the scope of this app was too big for us to complete within 36 hours. So we had to cut down the number of features to implement and really focus on the MVP. Another challenge has to do with the python backend we set up with Python. It was hard for us to connect fronend and backend because of the completely different set of modules for these two programming languages. However, we believe using Python can be beneficial to your data analysis because it provides powerful mathematical libraries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our use of the Google Map API which is something that none of the people on our team has implemented before. Setting tickers was also huge a milestone for us as we have incorporated our own feature onto the existing API. We also set up a thought-through schema in our database to support variability.

What we learned

Teamwork is dreamwork! We had a great brainstorming session and decision-making process to go with Warepair. Warepair is a very marketable app that was challenging for us to develop, but also made us excited about the potential of this app. Lastly, we all have gained a better knowledge on fulllstack development for web application.

What's next for Warepair

It's exciting to know many more features can be pushed out for Warepair to create a well-rounded user experience, such as verification and rating system of contractors, checkout process, and profile dashboard. We are looking forward to extending Warepair to mobile platforms because we believe Warepair provides the SaaS that everybody should easily have access to.