House Finder

House Finder was a website my group and I created for the final project of our ICS 314 class. For this project, we created our own groups of students to create our own website. We could either come up with our own proposal for the project with instructor approval or use the preapproved prompts. One of my group members came up with a proposal which we decided to go with. Basically, what we wanted to create was a way for students at UH Manoa to easily connect with landlords so that they can find housing easier. This was mainly for students that did not want to live in the dorms. This project was spread throughout the last month of the school semester, so from around mid-November to mid-December, it was cut into three different milestones. Each milestone had a certain requirement that we wanted to meet so that we would stay on track to finishing the assignment instead of doing it all the night before and failing. We also had to create a project site for the web application, which you can read more about here.

For this project, my main job was to work on the backend of the code along with updating the project site. I worked on creating the classes for all the houses and creating the basic functions that were going to be included on the site. For example, I created the page to add properties to our database. There were a lot of problems with this page because I did not know how to add images to the database. To remedy this, I had to look online for a solution, but they all revolved around uploading an image to some third-party software, having it store it at a certain URL, and receiving the URL that the image is stored at. However, I did not want to use software outside of what we learned in class since I felt that it went beyond the scope of the class, but also because I found another way to do it after consulting my professor. This was to convert my image using base64 so that it would become a string so that I could store that in the database. Then I would use that string to reproduce my image. I was also responsible for deploying our web application using Vercel which was a nightmare in itself. Here’s what the page ended up looking like after my group member added some styling.

Throughout the project, I learned how to manage my time more wisely and how to be efficient with the time I had. This project really tested my time management skills, and there were times when I thought we were not going to finish on time. Thankfully, my group and I somehow always managed to come through. I also had to juggle work and studying for other final exams/projects during my time working on this project, as it was finals season. I also learned how to recognize when something was not going to work and when to scrap an idea that seemed too complex. For example, near the end of the project we wanted to add more images to our properties, since we only had just one image at the time. However, I recognized that this was just something too complex to add during the final stages of the project and asked to not do it, since I knew I would end up being the one to implement it. Here is a link to the source code for my group project: House Finders