Y8K9 - Byte It - HomeBase YYC

Inspiration

Our group wanted to solve a real problem that students and newcomers in Calgary deal with often. Finding housing can feel confusing, especially when you do not know the neighbourhoods. We wanted to make something simple and useful that helps people explore housing options visually, instead of reading through long listings with no context.

What it does

Our project lets users select a region of Calgary and a type of housing they are interested in. After filtering, the program displays a list of matching options and shows the location of each housing option along with essential information about the area. This allows users to visually compare different neighbourhoods and make more informed housing decisions.

How we built it

We built our project by first gathering real community housing resource information and organizing it into a structured data format. From there, we designed an interface that lets users either enter their neighbourhood or click on a quadrant of Calgary. Based on that input, the app filters and displays relevant housing resources, along with average rent and key details.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced was debugging syntax and rendering errors. Since we were updating state, conditional rendering, and mapping data, small mistakes like missing brackets, typos in variable names, and incorrect component casing caused the interface to break.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we showed up to the hackathon and committed to building something meaningful. Even though this was a new experience for us and we ran into challenges, we stayed focused, worked together, and created a working project that we could submit. Finishing something we can actually share and use is something we’re really proud of.

What we learned

We learned how to work together under time pressure and solve problems step-by-step. We became more comfortable reading error messages, fixing bugs, and improving our code through trial and error. We also learned how to take a big idea and break it down into smaller, manageable tasks. Most importantly, we gained confidence in our ability to learn new things quickly and actually build something we are proud to share.

What's next for Y8K9 - Byte It - HomeBase YYC

If we continue this project, we would like to add more housing information such as price range, transit distance, walkability, and possibly live web data. We would also like to make a simple website interface so users can browse and interact in a cleaner manner.

Built With

• claud
• codesandbox
• html
• javascript
• visual-studio