For our project this semester, we are building a website that will facilitate the buying and selling of old items among Vanderbilt students. Our client is Emily Hugan, who is the founder of the popular GroupMe on campus entitled “Reuse, Vandy!”. This chat currently has almost 2,500 Vanderbilt students as members, and continues to grow each day. We talked with Emily last week about her mission behind creating the group. She aimed to create a space exclusively for Vanderbilt students where members can buy items second hand including old furniture, textbooks, etc. This offers a less expensive way of shopping, the convenience of not having to leave campus, as well as the safety of the network only being provided to undergraduate students. However in speaking with Emily, she also revealed some challenges that she’s dealt with in the GroupMe format. She told us that it is easy for “listings” to get lost, as so many messages are sent per day that the old messages get pushed way up in the chat. She said GroupMe sometimes randomly deletes messages. And members often post unrelated content in the chat, making it harder for someone who needs something to find what they are looking for. By recreating “Reuse, Vandy!” into a website, we aim to provide solutions to these aforementioned challenges, while retaining the original purpose that Emily originally envisioned.
Frameworks -> mongoDB, Mailchimp API, Heroku, Javascript, HTML, CSS, React & Node, Mongoose
To run: navigate to ReuseVandy.Herokuapp.com To edit the website: commit changes to GitHub repository and then reload the website.