Boiler Dorms

The newest and latest campus dorm review platform for Purdue University, Boiler Dorms provides a sleek interface and several quality features to consume and post reviews to your heart's content.

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Inspiration

We really wanted to create something that involved the school in some way. After we brainstormed a couple of ideas, we settled on a Purdue dorm rating website. What better way to address the current housing predicament by letting people share their gratitude or, more likely, vent their frustrations?

What it does

This website allows users to create an account with a purdue.edu email, a password, and their current grade level, read and write reviews on specific dorm buildings, and view the locations of each dorm as well as the surrounding areas with an interactable map. When not logged in, users can still read reviews and interact with the map, but only when logged in can you write and post reviews.

How we built it

The foundation of this application is React and JavaScript, which serve as the front end and our means of communicating with the database. Speaking of which, we also utilized Firebase authentication and Firestore services to store 'user' and 'review' documents and facilitate the creation and authentication of users.

Challenges we ran into

There were several challenges along the way, and each challenge was unique to how far along we were in the project. The first major challenge was getting the react app set up and fixing issues with git and GitHub. Many of us haven't worked in this large of a team with this many changes flying between devices, and we encountered many errors we'd never even seen before.

Once that was sorted and the project was truly underway, the second challenge became learning both firebase and react at the same time. All of us had some to no experience in these technologies, so learning both led to a lot of article reading, Youtube guide watching, and unadulterated frustration. Additionally, Sebastian spent much of Saturday finding a good map library to integrate into our project, and even more time getting it working, so quick shoutout to Sebastian!

Finally, the last challenge was getting the logic in javascript set up. Like mentioned before, very little JS and react experience. We learned about react hooks such as state and effect, and utilized them to drive through the roadblocks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was an ambitious endeavor for a group of four freshman with basically no experience with full stack web development to create a fully functional and fun application, regardless of how simple our tech stack was. Each member had their down moments but we all came through in the end and were able to take pride in our finished product.

What we learned

We learned so much about react, firebase, Javascript, and most importantly how to work as a team, delegate tasks and responsibilities, and that no matter how broken the javascript problem seems to be, there is always an even more broken solution.

What's next for Boiler Dorms

As it currently stands, our site is only code and isn't live on any URL. We would like to be able to change that in the future, so the students of purdue really CAN write and read as many reviews as they like!

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