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Inspiration

What should I do to buy and sell goods on campus? What do I do with all my extra stuff? I can't just give it to the New2U drive because the stuff could be sold, but I don't need it, so whatever… I'll take it home. Furthermore, why would I go through the effort of posting on existing websites with it often challenging to sell and buy anything with so many items and on top of that with internet scams being common? This shared mindset many students have on campus inspired us to help.

(U)Mass (U)nBoxed mission is simple: foster our community's growth and make resources accessible for all.

Our platform is committed to providing a secure, fun, and safe way to ensure that each UMass student can buy and sell goods exclusively inside the UMASS community! :)

What it does

(U)Mass (U)nBoxed platform fosters two different ways to interact with the community; it's simple: engage in selling and buying.

If you want to buy, you can filter based on residential areas and items you wish to purchase. Our website has some of the most popular things for college student essentials like clothing, decorations, furniture, UMass merch, and much more! You can get the price, condition, and seller information with each listing.

If you want to sell, you can list your listings using the "My Listing" tap, where you can upload product name, condition, price, description, residential area, category, and image. This ensures you can accurately capture what you want to sell and build on the community.

We believe that every listing grows our community – one UMass community member at a time.

How we built it

Our thought process and teamwork phases primarily revolved around ideation and development:

We constantly switched between ideation and development as we discovered problems with our initial approach. We found whiteboarding and mocking great ways to brainstorm and test our ideas.

The project was built on top of a MSAPD stack(Mongo, Svelte, Auth0, Postgres, Django). We used the following process:

Store Posting and User information through Postgresql
Handle Image Data and Document-based User Metadata through MongoDB Atlas
Enable SSO authentication through Auth0
Scaling API served through Django Web Framework with Gunicorn Workers
Frontend developed with Svelte hosted through PM2.
Deployed frontend and backend microservices on AWS EC2

Challenges we ran into

Initially, transitioning between ideation phase and development was challenging as we constantly tried new ideas (such as P2P, ML algorithms) before deciding on developing this idea.

We faced difficulties integrating the backend with a dynamically changing frontend, taking care to handle appropriate errors and address new functionality. Over the course of the hackathon, we had to leverage tools such as Auth0 and MongoDB Atlas in order to address key challenges, namely user authentication and storage of large data items (including files and images). Although we didn’t have as much experience with these technologies, we were able to get them up and running fairly quickly considering we went through an idea change several hours into the competition. Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of combining a well-defined API spec with intuitive UI to address a real use-case. In addition, it was very fun to work on developing a clean front-end design to display the results in a simple, informative fashion, especially while learning and working with new technologies that we didn’t have significant prior experience with.

What we learned

We have learned that communication is very important when working with a project that involves multiple components, in order to avoid conflicts as much as possible. It is essential that we follow certain specifications so that both the front-end and back-end teams follow a good guideline to build their respective software.