BoilerRides

Boiler Rides is a Purdue-branded transit platform connecting West Lafayette & Indianapolis students with affordable rides to airports and colleges across the Midwest.

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Inspiration

Campus transit often feels like a hassle for many college students. Current options for traveling between Purdue campuses or universities around the midwest are fragmented, and existing apps suffer from a boring, hard-to-navigate UI.

The Goal: We built BoilerRides to create a premium, inter-college transit network for busy students. We combined Purdue’s iconic brand identity with a high-performance interface to make travel as seamless as booking a ride-share.

How we built it

We utilized Claude to create a thorough prompt given features we knew we wanted to see in the app, put the prompt into Amazon Q to generate BoilerRides, and finalized the frontend/backend elements by getting rid of bugs with Gemini.

Challenges we ran into

The "Proxy" Hurdle: We overcame a major connectivity block where the Vite proxy struggled with IPv6 resolution, requiring us to reconfigure the pipeline to explicit IPv4 localhosts.

ESM & Architecture: Navigating strict ECMAScript Module (ESM) resolution taught us the value of clean directory structures and robust middleware patterns using custom HttpError classes.

Concurrency: We moved from standard "Read-then-Write" logic to atomic database updates to solve potential race conditions during high-traffic booking windows.

Why MongoDB Atlas

MongoDB Atlas stood out to us for 3 main reasons: Seamless Integration, Cloud Collaboration, and Flexibility. So we chose MongoDB Atlas because its document-based NoSQL structure maps seamlessly to our JavaScript objects, significantly reducing data transformation friction across our tech stack. Its cloud-native architecture enabled our team to collaborate on a shared, live dataset without the need to sync local database states, which was crucial for our fast-paced development. Also, the flexible, schema-less nature of MongoDB allowed us to iterate rapidly, adding complex features like mobility requirements and dynamic pricing without the overhead of traditional database migrations.

What we learned

This project also taught us the importance of seamless full-stack connectivity and robust error handling in a real-world application. Especially with MongoDB, we learned how to leverage the Atlas database to build a reliable transit system, like BoilerRides that specifically uses atomic updates to prevent overbooking and ensure data accuracy for reliability.

What's next for BoilerRides

Looking ahead, we hope to transition BoilerRides into a production-ready application by deploying to the cloud and scaling our infrastructure to support a larger student population. We also aim to expand our transit options to include features like real-time shuttle tracking and integrated carpooling, creating a truly comprehensive mobility solution for the college students!

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