RentMatch

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RentMatch is a web application for connecting tenants with landlords in a way that will provide a clean and simple interface to make the experience simple for both parties. This project was done as an entry for the 2021 Meteor hackathon in a group of four total UH Manoa students. This project was created over a period of five days and created mostly using Meteor and Semantic UI React. The main things we wanted this app to do was to make a nice rental experience where both tenants and landlords have an organized view of the apartments they are interested in and prospective tenants. We also wanted to include a chat system so that all communication happens within the app instead of relying on email or texting to communicate.

Implementation

The basic design of the app is a card swipe system popularized by Tinder. We felt this would help make it easier to filter listings for a user. Then users could go to a page that shows all the listings they have liked and on each one they would be able to to chat with the landlord to talk about the unit or set up a date to check it out. The landlord would be able to see a list of all prospective applicants and chat with them and be able to keep organized who they are meeting with and filter out people that don’t match their criteria.

Personal Contribution

For this project, especially being a five day time limit, I unfortunately did not do much. In fact I pretty much did nothing. The only thing I did was implement a way for landlords to upload photos of their unit as well as tenants to cycle through the photos on a listing. I also created some default data for rental units so that the app could be populated with listings instead of having to create them as we tested the app. I worked on these things on the last night before the presentation and unfortunately forgot to push my changes from my branch “photo-upload-rentals”, to the master branch so they were not included in the presentation.

Takeaways

This project and whole experience really helped me understand the importance of teamwork and communication. I did not communicate too well with my teammates which can cause frustration among them as I am not being a team player. I also did not manage my time well. I decided to do other things instead of work on this when I knew I should have because there was only five days to do so. I really do regret not being more a part of this project as I believe it was a great idea and I could have contributed more to make it come out better. I hate to have disrespected my teammates by being a part of the team yet not helping out and leaving one member to do all the work. This has been the first time I was part of a group and was that guy who didn’t do anything and it does not feel good. From this exeperience I learned that I do not want to be that person who doesn’t contribute anything and I know that I will not make this mistake again.