stuCamp: Hostel/Accommodation listing for students

Introduction

At the end of the Foundations year at ALX Software Engineering School, we are meant to develop a portfolio project within three weeks. We were allowed to build anything we wanted in teams of one, two, or three. This project aims to gather all the knowledge we accumulated during the year and use it to produce a fully developed project. We’ll be able to showcase it in our Portfolio and use it to improve our skills and learn new concepts independently.

I was opportune to partner with like-minded people; Abeeb Raheem and Samuel Adebayo. The brainstorming of the project idea led us to think of the problems or challenges we can solve together as a team. This gave us insight into the issues Abeeb Raheem and I had during the first year at the university where we ended up getting unsatisfied hostel or accommodation. This happened to many students during their first year and that led us to create stuCamp to solve the challenges.

stuCamp is a web application that helps students find the best accommodation available within the least amount of time. Enabling students to run very specific searches and retrieve detailed information on accommodations that match their exact requirements.

Every one of the team members was excited to work on the projects as we concluded to use the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, and Node) stack because it will be challenging and makes us learn some new technology.

Architecture

The React front end and the way routing was designed, allowed stuCamp to have more dynamic features without handcuffing the rest of the project. A REST API allowed this frontend to interact with our backend in a simple and well-documented way.

Collaboration

We make sure to work together regardless of each person's role. Generally, Abeeb took the lead on the back-end, Samuel took the lead on the front-end, and I was in charge of the devops and contributed heavily to the frontend and a bit to the backend. I also made myself available to work through any logic and code implementation problems my teammates had. I made sure to work closely with both of them in solving any issues or problems along the way. We all crossed over into different areas several times throughout the project.

Timeline and process

Features

Some features that users experience with stuCamp are user authentication and authorization, signup, and login for users, A visitor or registered user can search for an available hostel or accommodation. A registered user will have to log in before booking a hostel and a visitor will register before booking a hostel. Registered user can reset their password if forgotten.

We are also planning to implement payment services but time did not allow us and we will definitely do that soon with some awesome features to make our user experience the best.

This is not all for stuCamp! We are still hard at work making it even better and have more features coming your way.

Overall, working on a Portfolio project with two great like-minded people on a real-world app to solve problems was an awesome experience. I wish we would have had more time to develop it and implement more features, but we are very proud of what we have done so far and it constitutes a great conclusion to our Foundations year.

We are three passionate software engineers, who love learning new things and solving problems. If you’d like, you are welcome to reach out to us at our contact links listed below:

Suraj