Yard

Yard is a local listing aggregate designed to allow easy access to a variety of online marketplaces.

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What it does

Yard is a web app designed to simplify the process of navigating the many online marketplaces available, such as Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.

How we built it

We employed a decoupled server architecture by implementing a frontend client using html, css, and javascript that interacts with a basic REST server, written in Go, to load data as needed. The server itself polls outside API's and transforms the retrieved data before sending it to the client.

Challenges we ran into

  • The problem of retrieving data from the various marketplaces was perhaps the most difficult problem. These sites do not typically have a public API available to facilitate this process of obtaining the data necessary for our web app.
  • Connecting the client and server was a challenging process as a few oversights lead to mismatches between what the client was giving and what the server was expecting.
  • Learning new systems caused a lot of grief for us during the competition. Luckily we were able to work together and combine our collective knowledge to breakdown and understand the problem at hand.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all very excited that we were able to develop our MVP quickly. It allowed us to flesh out the project much more, and add many finishing touches. Without that extra polishing time, the project would not have turned out as well as it did.

The teamwork we had was also outstanding, and we are glad to have worked together. We were able to communicate effectively, collaborate on tough problems, and have a good time together over the past few days.

What we learned

There are many things that we learned during the course of the event. We each learned a lot of different languages and systems that we had not been exposed to previously. In addition, we all learned to work together as a cohesive team as we collaborated on the project.

What's next for Yard

The ideal dream would to have Yard incorporate many different marketplaces in its aggregation. Sites like Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, LetGo, Ebay and more could all be combined under one search system. Unfortunately, due to the tight sealed nature of those API's it is hard to collect much data without venturing into legal gray areas such as scraping.

Despite the current situation, it is very possible for these sights to open up their API's one day. We look forward to seeing this happening and the inevitable growth of tools such as Yard.

One thing that could be possible is implementing keyword recognition software into Yard, such that Yard could identify items within a post. With this information, Yard could compare posted prices with prices from retailers such as Amazon to provide clients further purchasing insight.

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