Our team is based in Miami, a city with a significant immigrant population, many of whom come here seeking job opportunities. This reality deeply motivated us to take on the Vanguard challenge, giving us the chance to collaborate and design for over three days. It’s truly inspiring to see what a team can accomplish when driven by a shared passion and determination.
Our project connects local communities by offering a platform where individuals can post and apply for small contracting jobs, such as pet care, yard work, and babysitting. It emphasizes supporting minority groups by helping them find job opportunities while allowing employers to easily find reliable help within their community. Our project features an open-source swipe functionality, making it easy for users to browse and select job listings. This feature allows users to swipe through available jobs, similar to how one would swipe through a gallery or social media feed. This design makes the platform more accessible and user-friendly, helping people quickly find opportunities that match their needs and skills.
We built the project using a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JSON. HTML provided the structure, CSS handled the styling and responsiveness, while JavaScript enabled the interactive features, like the swipe functionality for job listings. We also used JSON to manage and store data for the job postings.
Learning new technologies proved to be a significant challenge for our team, especially when attempting to work with platforms like Next.js. This initially slowed our progress, leading us to revert to a more vanilla coding approach, which extended the development time. Adding the swiping feature for job selection was also a difficult task, requiring us to troubleshoot several issues. However, thanks to our experience from last year, we were able to push through and complete the project successfully.
We are proud of several key accomplishments in this project. First, we successfully designed and implemented the navigation bar, starting with a Figma blueprint and translating it into functional code. Additionally, we integrated the swiping feature, which greatly improves job selection and accessibility for users. Lastly, we took pride in the organization and structure of our JSON files, ensuring smooth data handling and overall project efficiency.
We learned the importance of integrating better programming languages to enhance speed and code quality. Additionally, we gained valuable experience in using open-source resources and implementing them into our project. We also expanded our knowledge of CSS Grid and responsive design, ensuring compatibility across various screen sizes.