My Portfolio Project Blog
The main purpose of this project was to find welfare for people who want to search for a place to live. We worried about the facility and comfort for the landlord and users. All this created to optimize a "headache" process and transform it into a didactic web page and make the experience enjoyable and effortless. The personal focus of this project is for both sides users and owners, we want to help them for a facility in the process of searching, the application process, and optimize contact between both.
Timeline and checkpoints
For this project we had around 30 days, which we distributed as follows:
- Research and Proposal
- Week 1: Research and idealization of the project.
- Week 2: MVP proposal (minimum viable product).
- Week 3: Administration and organization of the project.
2. Create portfolio project
- Week 4: Development
- Week 5: MVP completed (minimum viable product).
- Week 6: Landing page unfolded, final presentation delivered.
The Crazy-Coders Team
I had the opportunity to work with two talented peers, Nelson Arevalo who was in charge of the DevOps structure and gave me a hand with the structure of the back-end, and Martín Corredor who did an excellent job with the Front-end and its structure.
A little story about all this…
One day I was searching for an apartment to move on and I liked several options, maybe 10 and I found out with a notebook write it down all information, phone numbers, location, and prices. I had to write this to identify at the time to call each one of them. The half announcements that I call were out of date or someone takes it already and when finally one was available the process just for application and for the real estate research my profile to see if I fit with landlord conditions take 2 weeks plus several days filling legal papers. EXHAUSTING!!! and some of the times it's useless because they reject you so it’s worse!! I told my peers and they shared annoying experiences about this, and THAT time is when this idea was born SunSquare!!, a web application that focuses on facilitating the experience for the person looking for a place to live, and in the same way for the person who rents the place; improving the communication between the two parties through a system of matching…A Real Estate Tinder. With a lot of things and new ideas in our heads, we dive into this project.
Infrastructure and technologies
For the Front-End, we opted to use HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, and React. We opted for these frames because they were the ones that best suited our needs, which were to locate elements in blocks or components, in addition to their versatility. React because we wanted to spend our time consolidating our understanding of JavaScript and some of its libraries, and the JSX syntax extension was very helpful to us by making it easier for us to write the components. For the Backend, we opted for Python and Flask because this framework is the best alternative for self-taught people like us who are starting in this world of development, since the Flask documentation is extensive and together with its simplicity in the code, it allows us to make applications easily, and it does not mean that they are low-cost applications.
Characteristics
You will only have to enter your data once, in your registration as a new user.
The are some features of the application:
Unlike other web applications, to apply an ad, the user will only have to click on apply and your data will automatically be sent to the owner of the ad.
It has a “My announcements” section where you can see the announcements that you have created, modify them and see the people who have applied to it, In this, you can see their data clearly and quickly to decide whether to accept or reject the person. (This is where matching is happening)
What did I learn about SunSquare?
When you are structuring a project it can be complicated to unify all the tools that you manage and find what the project may need to develop in an optimal way. But it is even more complicated facing every problem, every error not only about code about the organization, and suddenly it becomes a challenge that you really want to solve. So when it “ends” and I put between quotation marks because there’s a lot more to do, you realize all the work done and what you learn in the way. For me developing a back-end application with a lot of features requires a lot of knowledge, information, and research every day on how you can do it better. For me, I find out how practical can be Python and that there's a long road that I still have to travel but I LOVED IT! But not only in technical experience, working as a team is very challenging if your communication with your team is poor or the organization is not the best. In the end, I'm very grateful to them for all the work that we have done, I was very lucky with my team and the talented person that they are. So we will continue working on this project to fully complete it and make it known to the public since it has a lot of potentials and all the help that can provide.
Contact Details
- Find the code of our project here: https://github.com/julianamonr03/SunSquare
- Demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCBkCUZBjjw&t=8s&ab_channel=julianamonroy
- Find me on GitHub: https://github.com/julianamonr03
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliana-monroy-perez/