Description
HOME is an app/website that streamlines the Wesleyan housing selection process by allowing users to filter houses based on important qualities, such as occupancy, number of full beds, number of bathrooms, overall rating, loud/quiet street, single/multiple units, and street. Users can also submit ratings of and comments about houses they have lived in which can be seen by househunters. It uses firebase/firestore for backend, with firebase authentication. It was built by me, Isabel Armour-Garb, Jack Canavan-Gosselin, and Nalu Tripician during WesHack 2021. We built it in react-native to be usable on iOS, Android, and web.
A Difficult Interface
Like many of my projects, I came up with the idea for HOME when I became frustrated with the limitations of the Wesleyan housing selection website. Coming up with a ranking of the housing my group wanted required us to create an Excel spreadsheet where one of us manually went to the page for each house and inputted the description of the house (number of bathrooms, full beds, porch, etc) intoour spreadsheet. I wanted to be able to easily filter out houses with negative traits, such as twin beds or few bathrooms, to easily find the best houses.
Creation!
Our team decided to make HOME an app, since we wanted users to be able to submit images and we knew that very few people were likely to take a picture on their phone and then upload it to a website. I suggsted that we use react-native, since I had learned about it a little in class and the idea of using one Javascript codebase to make an iOS, Android, and web app at the same time was immensely cool. It took us a while to get the hang of react-native and Javascript, but we were able to create a fully functional app by the end of the hackathon!
Victory and Moving Forward
Our team won second place at WesHack, which was very exciting, as we were able to continue our winning streak from Hack@Brown and Happy Trails. We plan to polish up HOME to improve the UI and to allow users to also submit images of their house, and then we will deploy it to the App Store and the Google Play Store and get it into the hands of actual Wesleyan students!