37 Roomberry

With rent costs growing higher than ever, people often look for roommates to split the price. Roomberry is designed to help you find a roommate that is also your friend.

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Inspiration

With college around the corner, our team realized that there are no effective roommate matching services that focus on the personalized needs of each roommate.

What it does

The app targets a younger audience who may struggle to find affordable housing as they start to leave school life behind. Roomberry focuses on finding a roommate uniquely compatible with you. The matching algorithm does this by utilizing user responses from a personality survey to suggest available roommates with high compatibility, with whom you can initiate a real-time chat box to allow for communication before making a match.

How we built it

We used the React framework, a NodeJS backend, and Firebase as our database for the chat application and account storage systems. We divided the backend work among those with less experience, and left the front end to those with the most experience. Once our backend was complete, those with less experience would help and learn from the more experienced members.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge that we ran into was being unable to implement the location sorting algorithm that we originally planned. We initially wanted to use the Geolocation API (by Google), however we were unsure if the benefit was worth the time commitment. The major challenge that we faced was trying to reach all our goals within the time constraint.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One accomplishment that we are proud of is that we were able to achieve the ambitious goals that we set at the beginning of the hackathon, such as the chat function. Another accomplishment that we are proud of is finding workarounds to the challenges that we faced. For example, going into the hackathon, we had an idea for the project, but did not know how to implement it in the most effective way.

What we learned

We learned how to function as a team with unbalanced levels of experience and how to distribute workload among the team. In addition to this, we also learned how to implement front end and backend together.

What's next for Roomberry

Our next goals for Roomberry would be to restructure our website’s code and optimize our back-end architecture. Such changes would allow for the improvement of our location sorting algorithm and rework of the personality matching system. Finally, we would like to introduce new features that we were unable to implement in this short time frame, especially the ability to upload your own photos instead of using an external link.

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