By Aayush Bharadwaj, Lucas Landerson, Dane Jacobson, Elaine Li
Click here for a chance to win FREE tickets to next's week UW vs Nebraska game!
If you fell for that, don't worry -- you're not alone. Thousands of people are victims are social media scams each year. In fact, over $770 million were reported lost in 2021 alone. Trust us, we've been there. As someone who has been scammed twice out of football tickets on FaceBook by scammers posed as college students, I've learned to reverify the name and email with the student directory before engaging. However, this process is rather tedious, and I've always longed for a site where we can authenticate real students with real tickets. And to make matters worse, we often have to resort to FaceBook because of it's large platform. However, this madhacks, we decided to be vigilant and personally create a marketplace site -- by college students, for college students. We may have lost some football tikets, but we're winning a ticket to first prize today 😉.
On the surface, our website might look pretty familiar to any other online shopping websites/marketplaces. We have 6 main categories of items (tickets, appliances, furniture, subleases, clothing, technology), and 1 miscellaneous tab. We based these categories by going through and counting the most popular listings, as well as surveying friends about what they tend to look for online. All posts are featured within these categories, and are updated real time as users submit new ones. And students won't be able to sell or save posts without signing in with their school email. But, you might notice one thing quite particular -- where is the checkout?! Because these sellers and buyers are verified students, we encourage buyers to connect with the sellers via student email and vice versa. This way, both parties can feel safe knowing that the person on the other side are authentic. Also reseach has found that sellers and buyers who communicate beforehand have left with a more satisfied exchange than doing a cold transaction (ie giving the buyer a chance to negotiating but also giving the seller the chance to counter/justify). Instead of a traditional checkout, we have a "Saved" tab; where students are able to keep track of their favorite listings and contact the sellers!
We started with creating database using PostgreSQL through Google Cloud. This involved the provisioning of cloud based sources and the creation of a database with 5+ tables. This way, as user put in real inputs, we're able to map and send it into our databases. With the power of Hikari connection pools, we were able to connect our database to our backend, created through Java Spring. Meanwhile, the frontend team started designing template pages with static buttons, icons, tabs, etc. using HTML, CSS, TypeScript, and Angular. However, they didn't stay static for long as we were able to connect our Frontend to our Backend using several API calls to integrate it with real inputs from our database. We won't get into the gruelssome details, but let's just say, we have definitely grown a deeper appreciation for each click, button, tab on any website.
Although we had some experience with different appliations and languages, this is the first time many of us have explored them deeper than a superficial level. Learning applications in a classroom environment with specific instructions is entirely different than navigating on your own. Yet, that wasn't our most difficult challenge. Our most difficult challenge was deploying and connecting the front and back ends. At some point, we were willing to erase and restart due to the pure frustration; but many brain breaks later, along with numerous YouTube videos, we were finally able to deploy our project. You would think this would be our biggest accomplishments. However, the team bond that we built tonight was incomprehensible compared to everything else. Teamwork is not something that can be taught with a quick YouTube video, nor is it something that a mentor can tell you. Being able to build that tonight was pure determination, trust, and friendship. Thank you MadHacks.