RoomMass

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Inspiration

Last year, a teammate of ours was matched with an incompatible roommate at the start of the Fall semester. Even worse, they did not know where to move to and had a hard time finding a new suitable roommate. Since then, our teammate has been nurturing an idea to help those who are having similar problems. We saw tons of posts on Reddit that students complain about their roommates or just want to find roommates. Therefore, this website will help lessen the stress and anxiety caused by UMass's housing problems.

What it does

Have trouble with your current roommate? RoomMass provides ease of finding a new roommate, a new dorm room, or person who wants to swap rooms with. Users can connect to other students and find the most suitable roommate, based on their major, hobbies, similar course taking, etc. Swapping room can be frustrating as housing on campus is a shortage, and it is hard to find people who also carry the same intention. That's where our app comes into place. Users can make post, interact, filter, and see what fits them the most.

How we built it

We worked efficiently as a team from every phases, brainstorming ideas, sketching the idea to code, implementing and executing the code, testing, and adding more features. The very first and also the most challenging phase is brainstorming and sketching idea phases. We spent much time there to plan and outline what we are going to do to make sure that we don't get lost nor change the idea in the middle. We had an idea to help other students who have trouble living with their roommates or finding roommates, so we decided to implement a platform for it. With the plan that we had and evenly work division, we didn't have much trouble in making UI/UX and functionalities for RoomMass.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled to come up with a unique idea without it being totally impractical. This is our first time taking part in a hackathon and none of us has strong familiarity in web development, so we had many struggles to transform the idea into code. We took crash courses in HTML,CSS and React to get familiar with web development tools and utilize them in our project. There were times when we felt lost and wanted to change the topic and even give up, but with the encouragement of others, we tried our best and finished the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We've never built a web before but now we did. This is our first time work in a team to build a real-life product and configured a server site

What we learned

We learned how to devise a working solution to a real-world problem and assign tasks to our teammates based on our strengths and weaknesses. We learned how to push ourselves despite the lack of sleep and technical knowledge. Time management, as we had very little time to plan, develop, and test our project. We also had to come up with a documentation to present our product, which is as important as the project itself.

What's next for RoomMass

There are some ideas we have yet to implement given the time constraint, including but not limited to: Create a live chat box for user and their interested OP. Employ closure data hiding techniques to circumvent JavaScript’s lack of encapsulation. Display relevant data such as the nearest locations on campus relative to the dorm being reviewed, e.g., the closest dining hall, library, and gym.