Tar Heel Trade

Tar Heel Trade Logo

Inspiration

We were inspired by Facebook marketplace and thought it would be awesome to have a campus specific marketplace so students can trade supplies more easily. We wanted to encourage people to communicate in a way that promotes campus life and safety. Being able to buy and trade used goods allows for a more sustainable approach to living.

What it does

The website allows the user to create a profile, write posts, view others posts, and chat with sellers and buyers within the application.

How we built it

We built the application using VSCode and we used GitHub for version control. We used Next.js and Firebase in this project.

Challenges we ran into

One of the most challenging parts was getting the messaging part of the application running. Specifically, keeping the messages in real time and saving individual chat rooms.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the messaging feature we added for in-app communication between users as this is a tough challenge as the number of users increases.

What we learned

We learned a variety of things. We learned how to build a scalable database to safely store emails and passwords. We also learned how to integrate CSS with React to create the user interface.