Swamp Finder

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  Main map snapshot

Inspiration

We needed a quiet communal space to complete our Open Source Club hack-a-thon project. It was not easy to find such a place. The struggle we went through ended up giving us the idea of making a tool to locate such rooms easier leading us to Swamp Finder--a place for students to find unoccupied rooms. Literally knocking two birds in one stone, we can now find rooms for our future projects, and make a cool project for the community.

What it does

Our website serves as a visual, map based browser of University of Florida buildings, their respective classrooms and their schedules. With this tool, students can find a quiet place to complete their work without running the risk of going into rooms that are currently being used for lectures; While being informed of how much time before and after lectures, and with a easy way to locate the closest buildings with available rooms.

How we built it

We started with a react app as our foundation and utilized github to share our code with one another. Over the project we appended many more libraries such as leaflet, react router, and XLSX. One started off with leaflet library to generate the initial map UI. Meanwhile, one member of the them worked with XLSX to import a scrapped data into the back end for use, while the last member worked on the visuals. From there roles were assigned into front end, back end, and external contributions like the web scrapping that obtained our data, and utility tools.

Challenges we ran into

Publishing our website onto the web was our largest hurdle over the course of this project. We decided to abandon deploying our website and focus on polishing our product instead. As the late hours arrived, our efficiency dropped so it took longer to get the final touches in than expected. Due to the time constraints, we weren't able to accomplish many of our desired features, regardless, the core of the project was completed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of the successful implementation of the core of our protect: the visual browsing tool to identify free classrooms along with their schedules. While we wanted to implement many more features, time and skill restrictions limited us, but we are proud of our product, our teamwork, and our growth as a team and programmers.

What we learned

We each learned a lot about website design and project management. Sharing the same code base was confusing at first, but quickly grew to appreciate git version control and code cohesion between the three different team members versions. We learned how to work effectively with GitHub, along with react, and how to incorporate libraries into the code. While we may not be the best programmers, but this Hackathon served as a incredible opportunity to go one step further.

What's next for Swamp Finder

We have high hopes for this project as a useful niche tool. Hopefully we can deploy our website soon to support the gator community in finding available rooms. And we have many quality of life features thought of. The main feature we hope to add is a quick way to check which rooms near you are available. Sorting by distance and total room availability time. And massive improvements to the UI that were unable to be completed due to time constraint.

Built With

• express.js
• leaflet.js
• react