Shooots

What’s the matter?

It all started with defining a problem that is pertinent to the student population of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. For those who drive to school, parking is very hard to find. When one does find a parking spot, he/she would have to worry about whether it is secure from car robbers and parking tickets. Of course, the university does offer its parking structures to students but doing so can accumulate to big fees by the end of the semester. The amount of student parking passes that the university offers is very limited and the problem with carpool passes is that most students do not have anybody to carpool with. For those who use public transportation (i.e. TheBus, cab) or walk to school, it can be very tedious. Sometimes busses can run late and thus make the student late. Busses can also be very disgusting and commuters are not guaranteed a seat. Walking to school on the other hand is eco-friendly but it can be such a hassle, especially with Hawaii’s hot weather. Nonetheless, commuting to school can be very inconvenient.

‘Shooots’ to the rescue!

Shooots is a web application targeted towards the University of Hawaii at Manoa student population. It allows students to connect with other students for their carpool needs. By doing so, it can eliminate problems on both ends. For the drivers, it can allow them to purchase a carpool pass and park in one of the university’s parking structures. It can also reduce the amount of gas they pay by dividing it with their rider(s). For the riders, it can make commuting to school so much easier since they no longer have to worry about getting to school full of sweat or having to stand up in a long bus ride and the bus’ cleanliness.

Shooots in a nutshell

Below is the landing page. It describes the web application in a form of a slideshow.

Below is the home page. It shows links for students to “Give a Ride” or “Find a Ride.” It also displays the student’s confirmed and pending carpool appointments.

Below is the page where students can create/update their profile.

Below is the page where “drivers” can make a carpool appointment.

Below is the page where “riders” can filter through existing carpool appointments and schedule a ride with the driver.

Behind Shooots

Shooots was created by a team of three as a final project for our Software Engineering class. Our group used Meteor/MongoDB, Javascript, HTML, CSS as well as mLab to deploy the app and Cloudinary to upload images. The running deployment of the app can be found here. It requires a UH Manoa account to login.

My Contributions

The development of the web app was divided into two milestones. For the first milestone, I was in charge of creating the HTML/CSS mockups of the “schedule page” and the “profile page.” For the second milestone, I was in charge of implementing the functionality of the profile page and also incorpoating image uploading through Cloudinary for the application. I also enhanced the UI of both the profile page and the schedule page.

My Takeaways

Being that this is the first web application that I had built, it was a huge learning curve. It taught me the importance of project management, teamwork, communication, UI design, and backend implementation. In the process of implementing the features that I wanted to apply, I learned that it is better to think through the problem before rushing in to code it. By thinking through the steps needed to implement a feature, one can take into account the little but important details. Also, I learned that it is benefitial to take some time away from your code. There were times where I would stare at an error after several tries of fixing it and not know what else to do. There were also times in the UI design process where I did not know how to display the information to the user. After taking a little time away from my code and contemplating on it on my free time, I was able to solve all of the problems I came across. One of the most important lessons I learned while doing this project is the idea of teamwork. When I was really stuck on a problem, asking my team members for their opinions helped me to get across the problem in a smaller amount of time than if I were to solve the problem by myself. The saying “Two heads are better than one” is true. But in this case, it is three heads!