Saathi: Appwrite Hashnode Hackathon
Find Flats and Flatmates
Team Details:
Sarah Khan - (Sarah Khan )
Description of Project:
Saathi is a web app designed to be your companion when you're new to a city, especially catering to the Indian audience. It aims to connect people with their preferred roommates and flats that fit their budget.
Motivation
Mostly Tweets like these are my motivation. While there are websites available in India for finding rented flats, Saathi goes beyond that. Being wanted to create a platform that not only helps you find a place to live but also enables you to find your perfect flatmate. As I like to call it the "Tinder to find your perfect flatmate."
How Saathi Works
Saathi takes a unique approach by asking users a series of questions through a quiz. Based on their responses, a matching profile is created, showcasing the characteristics and preferences they have in common with potential roommates. Users themselves have a profile created based on the quiz, providing them with personalized recommendations.
Users can explore flats listed on Saathi with details such as location, address, bedroom availability, and amenities. Additionally, the web app allows users to request a tour with a sample template, making it easier to schedule and visit potential flats.
Saathi also empowers users to post their flats, expanding the pool of available options for others seeking accommodation.
Feedback-Driven and Scalable
I believe in the power of user feedback. My goal is to continually improve Saathi based on the feedback received. I am aiming to make Saathi a scalable product that addresses the needs of the Indian market effectively.
Stay tuned as Saathi evolves to become your ultimate companion in finding flats and roommates!
Tech Stack
React.js: Saathi's Frontend is completely built upon Reactjs due to its efficient and lightweight Virtual DOM, which allows for faster rendering of UI changes for a smooth enhanced user experience and a component-based approach.
Appwrite: Saathi leverages various services provided by Appwrite for seamless backend functionality. These services include:
Authentication: Appwrite's authentication service to implement user authentication.
Database: Appwrite's database service is utilized to store and manage user answers, questions, and flat listings.
Storage: Appwrite's storage service is employed to store flat images.
Mapbox API: Saathi integrates the Mapbox API to provide users with an interactive map feature. The Mapbox API enables users to visualize flat locations and explore nearby amenities. However, to ensure scalability, I plan to evaluate and potentially switch to a popular map service as the product grows.
Mailto: Saathi incorporates the Mailto feature, which enables users to send emails directly from the web application. This feature facilitates seamless communication between users, allowing them to connect with flat owners or potential roommates easily.
Challenges I Faced
Although this whole experience of working with Appwrite, participating as a solo member in a Hackathon was completely new to me. Amazing community responses and Docs were the best resources. Although the recent video Tutorials are limited when it comes to Reactjs. One significant challenge I faced was as soon as the user changes it answer or plays the quiz again it needs to be updated in the server as well. Here I required documentID as an important requirement. The potential solution could be listDocuments and loop to each document ID. But I felt Update All Document could be a method:
https://github.com/appwrite/appwrite/issues/5619
- One of the interesting challenge or you can say trouble I was facing and suddenly all my Database was showing 505 internal error. Searching upon, got to know could be the engineering error, server error. I was scared till death. Well that wasn't the issue me facing alone. Thankfully :D
What Does The Future of Saathi Looks Like?
Saathi is just the beginning of our journey towards revolutionizing the way people find flats and roommates. This Hackathon, I aim to analyze the product and based Improvements .
A Lot of works looks like Professional Map, Improving the UI further, Encrypting the user Data, Improve Scalability, Advance Search and Filtering Options.
Due to other commitments , That's it for now! Thank you for reading it this far!
Special Thanks To founder of Flashmates- US based startup for giving me another angle and approach.
This was a short but informative journey!
Public Code Repo
https://github.com/Sarahkhan20/Saathi