Doormie

The app's landing page for first time users
Join/Create Room Page
Enter Room Join Code Page
The home page of the app displaying all your roommates statuses
Popup modal for entering your current status
Panel to view all of your scheduled statuses
Popup modal for scheduling a future status
Click on someone's status box to view their list of scheduled statuses
Notes page! Leave a message for the rest of your roommates to see
Lists page! Create and edit lists with your roommates
A list to help you and your roommates stay organized (groceries, chores, etc.)

Inspiration

As first-year students at university, we have all had our fair share of experiences with our roommates. We hear stories from our friends who talk about how their roommates stay out so late, stay in all day, are too loud, always need a quiet space, are hard to communicate with, are easy to get along, etc. To simplify the communication between two strangers (or friends) under the same roof, we built a mobile app...Doormie!

What it does

Doormie is a mobile app to track the status of your roommate(s) to ensure that everyone is aware of each other's circumstances. In general, there are 3 main statuses: "Away from home", "Quiet please", and "Chilling". "Chilling" is the default setting (no special circumstances), "Quiet please" is used to let your roommates know that they should refrain from being loud (ex. when you are studying, napping, in a meeting, in online class, etc.), and "Away from home" gives your roommates a notice that you will be gone. You can add a description to further explain your status such as "eating out with friends" or "playing video games". To reduce manuals inputs, scheduled statuses are implemented where you can have your status automatically change at a certain time.

How we built it

We built Doormie using three main technological frameworks/services:

We used React Native to facilitate the construction of the front-end of mobile application. Having worked with it extensively, Javascript is a language that all four of us were already very familiar with, so React Native was the obvious choice of a framework.
To host our mobile application as well as emulate the app in real-time on our devices, we used Expo, an open-source platform designed to make React Native development easier
Finally, we also used Firebase's Realtime Database service to store all of the user as well as roommates' information, as well as Firebase's Authentication service to securely handle registration and logging in

Challenges we ran into

The greatest source of issues for us during this hackathon was getting Firebase and React Native to cooperate. Each worked properly on its own but we had difficulty fetching data from the database and dynamically integrating it into the working application.

Another challenge that was looming over us over the course of the weekend was mainly our lack of familiarity with React Native. This, combined with our sleep deprivation, left us working at an extremely slow pace. Hack the North is our first hackathon together after starting university, and we didn't realize how much more proactive we should have with school work and hackathon preparations in the week before the hackathon even started.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite struggling with React Native and Firebase, we were still able to create a functional mobile application that anyone can use to make living with their roommates easier!

What we learned

Through the challenged we faced, we were able to learn a lot over the past 36 hours:

How to code in React Native
How to fetch data from a Firebase Database and integrate it into our mobile application
The importance of gauging the feasibility of a project given the amount of time we have to complete it as well as our prior knowledge.
The importance of being proactive with school work and hackathon preparation the week before the hackathon so that we can start mentally fresh and ready to work hard over the entire weekend. This was our team's first hackathon after university started, and none of us were really prepared for the hackathon entering the weekend.

What's next for Doormie

Currently, Doormie is just the mind baby of four university students who believed that roommate communication was lacking and needed an app to make it easier. However, the potential it has reaches far beyond the horizons of a 36 hours hackathon project. What do we have planned for the future of Doormie?

A messages board, conceptually similar to a fridge door with sticky notes on it
A shared lists page where roommates will have the option to create lists and edit them together. This is useful for keeping trach of groceries, chores, and other regular household necessities
The option to add a profile picture for yourself rather than just using the first letter of the user's name