UH-Broadcast: A UH-specific flea market

I, along with my teammates Ben Kim, Hubert Liang, Weihao He, and Mark Pascual made a web application for our fellow university students to buy and sell from each other for our software engineering class.

Students at our university often need to buy and sell items, whether that be buying a required textbook for a class, selling clothes to make some much-needed money, or various other reasons. However, because there is no official website for our university that allows students to buy and sell with each other, students have had to rely on outside means to do any of these things. This not only poses an inconvenience but also could be a safety risk as students may come into contact with strangers not associated with the campus while trying to buy or sell items. Building an application for those at our university that checks whether or not the user is a student via their email login before allowing that user to buy and sell allows students to be rest assured that they are communicating and giving or receiving money from people who are verified students at the university. This is why I and my team built UH-Broadcast. UH-Broadcast allows students to put an item for sale via “Add Listing”, view their own items for sale via “User Items” and see and make offers on others’ items via “Item Listing” (picture shown above).

I helped build the “Item Listing” page by allowing users to see all items but not being able to delete others’ items. My team used Issue Drive Project Management to complete this project; we added tasks to each project milestone on our Github work page (called “issues”) for group members to claim and work on. I helped come up with several of the issues and of course worked on and completed some of them myself. I helped organize group meetings for our projects and took notes during those meetings and was often the first person to notice issues on our webpage as I frequently played around with it to make sure it was working. I and my team members also implemented tests in the code to test to make sure that every single page of the project was working. Perhaps one of my biggest contributions to the project also included finding other UH students not in our class to test our website and provide feedback. I found the majority of the students who ended up testing our website and recorded their feedback in our “Community Feedback” section of our Github.io page (linked below).

This was my very first time working with others on a web application. This project tested nearly everything I learned in class–React, Bootstrap, Meteor, merging and branching, among other topics. While it was intimidating in a way given how complicated it seemed at first, I and my team, with our combined efforts and stellar team communication, made it work. This project also further reminded me of the importance of team effort and building up each other’s confidence. I and basically all of my teammates became stuck on something in the project at least one time, but we always went out of our way to help each other out on our individual tasks for the project and constantly encouraged each other. I think our positive attitude despite some of our struggles is one of the biggest reasons why we were able to complete this project, and I’m glad to have worked with the people on my team.

Here is the link to the project home page: Uh-Broadcast.