Ridersity | Devpost

Inspiration

Whether going home for winter break, to that concert in San Francisco, or HackDavis, college students need rides. We were inspired to create Ridersity knowing that a large number of University students need to get places but don't all have cars. Oftentimes platforms such as Facebook Ride-Share groups are too crowded with posts and are overall unorganized. With Ridersity, we are centralizing the college ride-share process as drivers drive to recoup their costs and riders ride with those going in the same direction as them without paying outrageous prices, all the while leveraging the environmental benefits of carpooling.

What it does

Ridersity simplifies the process of finding carpool opportunities. Riders fill out where they're going and when, and get a list of drivers available to give them a ride. Drivers fill out where they're going and when and get notified when riders join them.

How we built it

We used Figma to prototype the interface and frontend and implemented it with Next.js and Tailwind CSS. We developed the backend with Node.js, Express, Typescript, and MongoDB. We made a custom Json Web Token based OAuth with a refresh token, hosted on Google Cloud compute. We registered our domain with domain.com.

Challenges we ran into

As a team of all beginners, there were a lot of challenges that we ran into. Initially, it was difficult to settle upon an idea that we thought would be practical as well as presentable since none of us had much experience designing user interfaces. It was also difficult to implement the functionality of the project since we weren't very familiar with the frontend stack.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite its limited functionality, we're proud that we managed to create a project that we know would benefit many others and even more so in that it is a project that we ourselves would use.

What we learned

We learned how to use Figma in order to organize our design and front-end development process. We also learned Next.js and Tailwind.

What's next for Ridersity

We believe with further development and fine-tuning of our user interface and some user research/testing, Ridersity would be able to be deployed as a functional and scalable platform for college students. We plan to implement Google Maps API to facilitate auto-filling city-to-city connections.