Inspiration
CribConnect was inspired by our personal struggles in finding compatible roommates within the local area. Frustrated by the tedious process of searching for suitable living arrangements, we aimed to streamline and enhance the roommate matching experience through an intuitive and efficient platform.
What it does
CribConnect is designed to facilitate connections among students seeking compatible roommates in close proximity to their universities. By focusing on the unique needs and preferences of university students, CribConnect aims to streamline the roommate search process and foster harmonious living arrangements. Through its platform, students can easily find roommates who not only share their academic pursuits but also complement their lifestyles and personalities, enhancing their overall living experience.
How we built it
Our team realized that the lack of applications for finding student housing/roommates was very frustrating. We realized that this would be a great opportunity to design our own application to make the process streamlined for students like ourselves.
We decided to take on this challenge by creating our backend through MongoDB and utilizing ReactJS for our frontend.
Challenges we ran into
In the frontend we first ran into issues when we started building the form for the user’s profile. We realized that the process of saving the user input would be difficult as we had many unique form components. We spent a good amount of time trying to figure out a solution to this problem but after a while we went ahead and consolidated the form to make the process streamlined. While working on the frontend we also ran into a few issues with how certain components looked on one device rather than another. This was an issue that we quickly discovered and were able to fix rather quickly. Lastly, an issue we ran into on the front end was rendering a map that would allow users to select a university to seek the nearest apartments. We worked on rendering this feature through Google Map API and MapBox however, there were many errors that ultimately we were not able to fix. However, with more time we would like to implement this feature as it would serve well to the students using CribConnect.
In the backend end we ran into issues when we first tried to implement Kintone for our application. Kintone unfortunately was not a suitable solution for our application as there was not enough flexibility to store all of the data that we had within CribConnect. After realizing this we decided to move on to MongoDB as an alternative. MongoDB posed a few issues for our backend. We soon had issues with network settings and ran into a block. However, after more hard work we were soon able to fix our issues and got our backend up and running.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was the time constraint. We were really ambitious and ran into many problems while trying to finish our project. There were many times where we realized that we were under a time crunch and had to pivot and implement the MVP for CribConnect.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to say that we have a working prototype of our application up and running. We are able to have users interact with our application and enter their information. We are proud to have our webpage fully functioning and having multiple features.
What we learned
During this hackathon team CribConnect learned that we must be more careful with our time and allocating it more efficiently. At the start of the event we thought that we would have enough time to implement our very ambitious ideas. However, as we began coding and the time started flying away we realized that we would soon have to cut down on the features that we wanted to implement and finish our MVP.
What's next for CribConnect
Next up for CribConnect, the team plans to expand its reach to more universities and student communities, offering its intuitive platform to a broader audience. Additionally, CribConnect intends to forge partnerships with universities and housing providers to provide even more comprehensive support to students in their search for suitable living arrangements. Through ongoing refinement of its platform based on user feedback and the integration of innovative features, CribConnect aligns with the principles of sustainable urban development by enhancing the efficiency of roommate matching processes and fostering cohesive living environments.
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