RentMatch

About

In a team of four people, we created a renting app called RentMatch using Meteor, MongoDB, and Semantic UI React. RentMatch’s goal is to create a fun and easy experience for users looking for a place to rent and help landlords find the right match for their rental. RentMatch combines renting with Tinder to allow users to like and dislike rentals. When a user likes a rental, the landlord of that rental is able to approve or disapprove the user’s interest by looking through their profile and/or chatting with them through the chat function. This minimizes the unnecessary disorganization and confusion that comes from applications that sell various items in addition to rentals or presents an overwhelming amount of rentals at one time.

The Home Page

My Contributions

For this project I did not contribute much. I mostly worked on bug fixing, making filters for the rentals, and writing the README file. I tried to make filters for the rentals, but I was having a difficult time working with the state and providing functions to get them to work together to narrow down the rentals. I tried putting it in a Form with Semantic UI React, but I ended up running out of time before I could get it to run. My goal was to give users an easy way to weed out the rentals that don’t fit their criteria. I ended up only having the visuals of the filters so I did not commit it to the main, but here is a picture from the branch I was working on:

The other task I worked on was the README file. I provided information about our application and team. I wrote about our goals and features that the team created in the application. I added pictures to help users understand how a person would be able to use the application as well.

Learning to be Better

From this project I learned that time management and communication are the most important things to have a successful group project. During this project, our team fell apart. Given the short time frame of 5 days many of the teammates were unable to start working on the project until the third day into the competition, myself included. Due to this, majority of the project was completed by one team member. I greatly regret this, but it has taught me what I should have done in this situation. I should have told my team members the situation that I was in at the time, so we are able to cooperate on who does what. Many times I was working on something and then while I went to my job another team member finished it under a different branch. The lack of communication hurt us, but now I know how important it is. This is nothing to show-off, but it’s a learning experience that I will document and remember to grow from.

On a happier note, I also learned about Form.Groups that help make all of the elements side by side which was useful in creating the filter functions because I needed input, but in a horizontal format.

Learn More

Here is the link to our README file that explains the project in more detail and with more visuals: RentMatch.

Our source code is located here: Source Code.

The deployed application can be viewed here: Deployed RentMatch.