Dinex Daddy

Inspiration

As first-year students who have been here a month, we strongly empathize with every student on campus who has ever had TOO many blocks, flex dollars, or Dinex at the end of the semester and have no one to share it with besides their friends (and there's only so much pizza a group of friends can eat). We wanted to make a craigslist equivalent that is CMU-specific to connect people who have goods or skills that they want to trade for meal plan currency.

What it does

Our website is simple: if you have excess meal dollars, search through the listings to find people willing to trade you for toys, cash money, or massages. If you can't find what you want, lodge your own listing! People will contact you if they want to exchange.

How we built it

We tried to host a SQL server and store our listings on there, but none of the hackathon TAs knew SQL and we were not energetic enough to learn. So we created an alternative database in-client on HTML in order to showcase our idea and gauge their engagement as a minimum viable product.

Challenges we ran into

SQL is hard to learn in 24 hours, which is apparently why people get paid a lot to work with databases. We also found it hard to store and configure data entirely client-side, but that was accomplishable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got it working, our website has a nice gradient

What we learned

Tyson learned how to work with SQL, and Alex and I learned the joy of smacking around HTML for an hour without any indication where the error was. It was also cool that we had older and more knowledgeable people to ask about any obstacles we ran into.