cober

Inspiration

3/4 of us are out-of-state or international students, and have had the shared experience of making trips to the SFO via uber, whether it's because of excess luggage or safety. Trips to SFO can be excessively expensive, and to circumvent this, people often think to share the ride. However, current ride share options on Uber or Lyft do not actually split the cost evenly, and each individual is not effectively paying a price proportional to the distance of the trip and the space they occupy in the car. The only way to actually be saving money and paying a fair share of the price is to split the ride with someone you know. We've often seen club members, friends, or floormates reach out about interest to share an Uber in public forums. After all, people would feel more comfortable splitting the ride with a friend, acquaintance, or just someone from the same college.

What it does

The idea behind Cober is to provide a centralized platform for students from the same college make or join ride share requests. Upon making an account, members can view active ride share requests they can pick from based on pick up location, date, time and a preference for gender of other riders. Members can also post requests with the same information to be displayed on the website.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many problems with the backend, starting off with the sample code from Cockroach DB, but soon realizing that efforts were futile since we were trying to integrate a persistent connection for our database with serverless functions in Vercel, which kind of threw us off our tracks since we could not get it to work. We then completely switched gears and started using Prisma, but then to our surprise there were no instructions on deployment, so we had to settle for implementing everything locally. In the end, we had all of our data and tables set up in the backend along with modular components made with Chakra-ui, but we couldn't manage a full integration, and why we have a short simulation of the table.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of overcoming obstacles! We're also proud of the front-end design of our website! One of us pulled an all-nighter for the first time in their life, and they are glad they did not hallucinate, and now all is well with a red bull (thanks sonr).

After spending 14 hours on the backend, it was a bit disappointing to not have everything completely functional, but we are proud of the fact that we stuck with it and completely changed our tracks several times to restart from scratch with a resilient attitude.

What we learned

All of us were unfamiliar with the technologies that we used for this project, but we all learned quickly and adapted to eventually come out with a product that we are proud of. We split the project up into manageable chunks, each teammate focusing on a specific area, frequently checking back in to keep everyone on the same page.

What's next for Cober

What we have at the moment is our MVP (minimum viable product), and after sharing just this with fellow hackers, we know the sky is the limit. Our plans including implementing more features such as the flagging system and full profile page, expanding our resources to handle a large user base, and UI/UX features that will make for a smoother user experience.