NomadDesk

Ever need to find a work/study space outside the house? Discover new desks with NomadDesk and work anywhere, anytime. 🌎

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Inspiration

With established companies cutting back on brick and mortar and with the rise of independent content creators and small businesses, individuals working remotely in this post-COVID pandemic world face the challenge of finding spaces to work outside of the house.

What it does

NomadDesk finds the best co-working spaces in the most popular and unlikely places based on user venue and ambiance type preferences and around a specified meter radius from your location. NomadDesk lists it's 10 Google Maps recommended locations ranked by Distance through generated cards. These cards contain data helpful to the user's eye such as User Star Rating, price range, address, and link to the study spot's venue.

How we built it

We built NomadDesk with a Vite + React frontend and an Express.js + MongoDB backend. We also implemented the Google Maps Places API to access JSON data for the study locations.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges include learning and using Express and Google Maps API, integrating Google maps API in backend, and connecting the frontend to backend (i.e. getting cookies running). Additionally learning new styling techniques with React component library MUI and rendering the JSON output from the Google Maps endpoint into each location card were especially difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to use the Google Maps Places API. We worked as a team to figure out which of the location types individuals would want to study at, to set as our choices for the dropdown menu.

What we learned

We learned how to create a clear connection between frontend technologies to backend technologies and even use technologies new to us like the Maps API, MongoDB Atlas clusters, and the MUI styling.

What's next for NomadDesk

Unfinished plans scheduled for completion this weekend include creating a domain name, implementing user ability to star locations to their "favorites" list, save past locations/history, and incorporating Open AI's ChatGPT Wrapper to create a summary of the quality of the work space. Also we planned on adding more filters (i.e. Wifi Speed and Noise Levels preferences) to our navigation bar to help users find the perfect space for them.

More future plans involve using a Yelp API or another Google comments API where we could run sentiment analysis on the discussion replies data among users to find the general feeling people have towards a certain study space. We initially wanted NomadDesk to be more AI Travel focused where users could not only finds the best co-working spaces, but also to general itineraries to find ideal work setups by finding visa rules and travel deals based on preferences. Finally, we'd want to create a sharing aspect to the app (considering the already multi-user aspect of it's current Register/Login). We'd encourage users to help each other reveal the most underrated study spaces in their cities and build communities of remote workers, learners and creators.

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